More compost and more time

We continue to grow our compost. Here's one part:

That's our "lower pile", located below the new plots below the house. The framework is based on the Nearings' model, a series of (mostly) straight stick sticks stacked up to make a wooden cage. Each stick is around 4 feet long.

What's in the cage: when that picture was taken (spring) it was a mix of green (weeds, grass, ferns) and brown (leaves) from this year, along with rotted remains of the same from last year. Since this photo was taken I've shoveled some goodies on top of it:

• thin slices of chicken poop, excavated from various roosting locations. These bits are glorious heating elements. The pile steamed after they kicked in!
• heaps of compost from another location, the "upper pile". This stuff is 1-2 years old.

Combined, this pile should be grand for next spring. And also useful to dig into some plots this fall, before frost.

There is such immense satisfaction to be found in compost-making, so much so as to be nearly embarrassing. For one, there's the pleasure in building stuff which is useful, for zero cost. For another, there's learning some very practical stuff - what to add, what to avoid, how to layer. Moreover, the personal connection is, er, intimate, given the power of adding human urine to the pile.

Beyond those immediate and short-term rewards, though, I feel an extension further forward, into several years. I know this stuff will be good in 2011, and some will work in 2012. It feels like a pocket of time, standing next to the compost pile, removed from the schedule of work/Web/ school/etc., feeling that connection into the passage of years.

On top of that (literally), there's the decades-long framework. With each layering of compost into our land we improve the soil incrementally. As decades go by, if we keep doing this, the land itself will be better. What a curve to press oneself against!

Compost scare

Here's one reason we're happy to make our own compost:

The Chittenden Solid Waste District released a statement on Friday evening alleging that the trace amounts of herbicide in its Green Mountain Compost this spring has also been found in six compost products from five local companies.

Why does this matter?

The district had seven other local compost products tested as part of an effort to figure out why its compost caused plants to die-off this summer.

It's time to turn the compost: some homesteading practice

We're far enough into spring that it's time to turn out compost piles.

Some words of explanation: it's a very, very good and useful thing to have ample supplies of compost for growing crops.  It's super-soil for young plants, a terrific booster during a short growing season.  So we make compost all year round, building up piles consisting of kitchen scraps, mown grass, some weeds, and plenty of autumn leaves.

It takes 2-3 years for a pile to mature into decent soil stuff.

We structure each pile in a framework made from tree limbs and branches, more or less of uniform length and shape.  They stack in a square, keeping the pile tidy and contained.  Each one looks like this:

We read about this method in the Nearings' books.

Here are our earlier posts on composting.

So what does "turning the compost" means?  We have to take apart the wooden lattice, then turn the pile upside down.  The reason has to do with the process of composting.  All of those scraps, leaves, etc. turn into soil-like stuff gradually, and from the bottom up.  Upend the pile and the last-to-be-transformed materials now receive the fine lower position.

How it's done: I (Bryan) remove the first four or so rows of branches, stacking them on a patch of ground right next to the pile.  With a pitchfork I toss bits of the pile's top into the next patch, keeping the material inside the wooden square.  As I dig down into the pile, I remove branches and add them to the new one.  Eventually a mirror image pile appears.

It takes about 30 minutes per pile, unless the core is frozen, in which case more time is needed.

We usually do this once in spring and once in late fall.

You can buy or make plastic drums mounted on an axle, which can be spun round by a handle.  That's appealing, but we'd need a lot of these for the amounts we use.

How's your composting this May?

In dirt

I spent a lot of time with my hands in dirt this week.

The upper compost pile needed turning. This involved dismantling the wooden pole structure, rebuilding it next to the pile, then pitchforking the stuff into the new framework. I stuck in some chicken- and goat-amended straw in, to speed the rotting.

What it looked like last November.

Now the compost is clearly dirt, brown and crumbly, hard to distinguish from the soil around it at first glance.  One difference is plentiful worms, which I found throughout the pile.

Two years of piling and rotting, and we now have a cubic yard of fine dirt.  Egg shells and coffee grounds, grass cuttings and leaves, rain and urine have transmogrified into something like soil.  Slow, easy alchemy.  We'll let it mellow for the rest of the summer, then shovel some in to a couple of needful plots for overwintering.

Also this week we worked on the driveway, yet again.  If you haven't read here before, our driveway is fine farming earth, unfortunately: soft, eager to hold water.  So it becomes swampy during rain season, and quickly rutted and hard to drive on.  The default state used to be something like this:

In good weather.

So our excellent snow removal guy came and graded the thing, dragging a heavy iron blade down the driveway's length.  The results were flat, and also broad, as he widened it at a couple of points.

My runoff ditch, which runs the whole length from road to house on the uphill side, was partially blocked by fresh dirt.  So I dug it clear again, heaping the spilled earth onto the driveway's main rut lines.  I pulled out some rocks (always, in New England) to use elsewhere.  And I moved ten feet of trench sideways a bit, digging a new and wider path, which widened that piece of driveway.

I feel a child's delight in this work, a sense of gleeful play in making shapes out of earth: a long trench, a cubic stack, humped lines to be flattened by cars.  A couple of days after fixing up the runoff trench a squall hit, and I enjoyed seeing the trench fill with muddy, coursing water.  There's the playing-in-mud delight, combined with the low tech pleasure of seeing wet kept off of the damned driveway.

Low tech: working on compost and driveway, I could see the tree which holds our broadband radio.  I worked with an mp3 player in my pocket, playing podcasts about history, technology, and culture.  Yet my mind was occupied with the other end of history: shoving rocks, feeling my back stretch, watching worms wriggle through compost.  I thought about each layer of compost added to the earth, the soil being rebuilt and refined year after year, stretching into a dim future.  I envied the Romans and their engineering might, and tried to recall what made their roads so sturdy as I plopped dirt onto my little via.

First plantings and turnings of the year

It's late April, and things have warmed up enough for us to work on two vital homestead tasks: planting and compost turning.

It's still too cold to plant much, but we can start off with hardy (and essential) garlic.  Ceredwyn took to our southern plot, digging it up then planting bulb after bulb.

The board is a pathway between two plots.

Once we harvest the garlic we can turn those plots to other crops.

Ceredwyn also planted more flowers around the homestead.  Not only will they look nice, but also attract pollinating insects and birds, hopefully speeding the growth of our food plants.

Meanwhile I turned each of our (three) compost piles.  The two older ones are mostly fine-looking dirt, just in time for us to use.  The younger pile - just one year old - is also the hugest, about five feet tall now:

Note the cage of branches, which we use for all of our piles.

As April finishes up and May kicks off, we'll start putting down the compost for potatoes, tomatoes, beans, and squash.  Half of the northern plot is new to cultivation, so the compost will be especially needed.

It is splendid to work outside on the earth after so many frozen months.  To use shovel and pitchfork, to pry rocks out for use on our stone walls, to watch the dog plash into a pond, or see the cats ruthlessly stalk very noisy birds - it's a huge rush of springtime, of rewarding physical effort.

And yet I can't help thinking of the growing season's end, of chilly October and the retreat of the sun.  I feel as if I'm holding this short, precious time in my hands, and must work speedily - and with care - while I can.

An ordinary day on the homestead

A snapshot of life on Pagan Lane, on a typical summer day

No major thing happened today. No crisis erupted. No big project was attacked. I (Bryan) had a full day of home office work, an ordinary amount, around which I did my part in the tasks outlined below. Ceredwyn had tons of stuff to do beyond homestead chores, and fit in the following between her various items. No kids were home for most of today, as each attended a different summer camp.

Now, as I write this at the end of the day, with the sun setting through the forest downslope from the house, it feels like we didn't do enough. It's as if no major progress was made. Lots of routine process and maintenance happened, but are dwarfed by so much else to do!

So, from sunrise onwards, Bastille Day up in the Green Mountains:

1. Feeding animals. Ceredwyn fed the goats this morning, and is about to do so again now (7:15 pm). She fed the new chicks in their cage. She also fed the delighted dog and the bemused kittens.

2. Tending crops. We both did some light weeding, "light" mostly because there weren't any impending jungles, and we had other things to do. Ceredwyn sprayed some of the potato plants, which seem to be ailing. Overall, the big potato plot is booming:

I also hauled up some large weeds from random spots, to feed the upper compost (not the lower).

3. Tending the chickies. Ceredwyn (mostly) and I (a little) dragged the chickies' cage from the safe basement to the blazing afternoon outside. We stripped away the bottom layer of cardboard and shavings, transferring the former to some weed patches (to squelch them) and the latter to the upper compost (mmm, chicken manure is terrific). Then Ceredwyn put down a new cardboard layer, drawn entirely from boxen destined for recycling, and we dragged the chirping chickies in their cage back into the cool basement.

(Bright light on the left is a heat lamp)

4. Wrangling rocks. I scooped up a pail of gravel from the oddly-graveled spot near the upper compost, then poured it out into the rain garden's trough. That's a slender pathway cut through dirt, leading from the top of the raingarden down to the pond. These little rocks should keep the trough healthy. Alongside it are some water-loving plants.

(The newly-lined water trough runs down the center of that photo. The rocks are light-colored, often white. The rocks on the left edge have been there since we made the thing, constituting an ornamental boundary.)

Then I started work on a pathway from the basement back door. I'd already accumulated a stack of flat rocks. So I dug up the ground leading away from the back door, a very tough mix of clay, plenty of rocks, and tenacious grass. I shoveled down through it about three inches, then poured store-bought sand onto the newly-revealed dirt. Next, I set down the flat rocks, like so:

Walking on the rocks should press 'em down to a level surface. If it works, and it feels like it should, I'll extend the pathway.

5. Driveway repair. I continued yesterday's work of breaking down the strip of dirt running down the driveway's middle, a sort of extended plateau between parallel ruts, about 6 inches up. Yesterday I broke up one side of that higher ground, the right side, and shoveled the dirt+rocks onto the right rut. Today I did the left side. Now the overall effect is less uneven. Ceredwyn drove over it a couple of times, pressing down the freshly-shoveled dirt into a firmer mass.

Unfortunately, the ruts will reappear, in time. The dirt is simply too soft - it's actually, sadly, good farming soil. But the ruts might not be as low as they were two days ago, the central strip not quite so high. And I plan to keep pouring small rocks onto the ruts. Eventually, at some point, we'll have a firmly packed driveway.

6. Exterior wall improvement. Ceredwyn nailed up a bunch of Typar onto the back wall of the house. You see, when we bought our home, the previous owners hadn't finished the back of the house. Parts of it are covered with wooden shakes, as are the entirety of the other three sides of the house; parts of it are not. Bare concrete and wood have thus been exposed to winter winds for some time.

So Ceredwyn ordered some of this Typar, which is a plastic+insulation layer, and stapled it to the uncovered parts with a fine staplegun.

Here's an interesting part of homesteading: the town fire chief helped. Not only is Erik a friend, but he's head of the squad on which Ceredwyn serves. Ceredwyn has been doing a lot of hours of late. And today Erik climbed up a ladder to help with the highest parts, held the other side of wide Typar pieces, and so on. So there's a quiet bit of neighborly labor trading.

We also did the usual bits of daily home life, apart from professional work: waking up Owain so he could get to camp in time, making meals and cleaning the dishes, putting away laundry, talking with our daughter on phone from camp, getting our son from his camp, answering the phone, doing some bills.

And there's so much yet to do! That recent wood delivery remains unstacked, and enormous:

Is this kind of day survey useful to you, o reader? What do you think?

Working the land, and thoughts of time

Greetings from Pagan Lane in mid-June, friends. Here's a snapshot of today, as per some of your requests.

Morning: feeding the various animals. Cats and dog are easy; it's the goats which are more challenging. So Ceredwyn hauled feed out to them, and water. Unfortunately, one escaped from the enclosure and romped about for a bit, yawping and nosing, until Ceredwyn and Gwynneth teamed up to get goat back in goatspace.

This kind of animal wrangling can be very stressful! On the one hand, there's the sense of frustration and failure felt when the beastie simply refuses rational directions. On the other, the gut-spasming shock of impending destruction, as the goat homes in on rows of freshly planted (or freshly growing) veggies.

Afternoon: a full-scale sweep of the homestead with two targets.

1. Trimming the lawn, or the various lawns not enclosed by electric fence and slated for goat-brush-hogging. This is partly a matter of convenience, in that having laws to tromp over makes it easier to haul rocks, wood, etc. It also stems from, what, a persistent suburban ideal of green flat laws, or a resistance to total wildness? Moving does mean some tasty greenmanure. It's done with an old, reliable push mower, using only human muscles.
2. Weeding every single plot. So we straddle the potato rows, squat in the dirt alongside the onions or broccoli, identifying the enemy and yanking it out. Lots of green casualties get ferried to the compost piles, bucket by bucket.

Evening: as a light rain and the dusk light start to fall, I plant corn and beans. Corn in a freshly made bed, a kind of terrace on a sharp slope. Beans in two beds on the other side of the homestead, from which we've harvested some barbaric radishes. In fact, I pulled a dozen tonight, red bulbs gleaming in the deepening dark.

I (Bryan) do this in what Vermont offers for summer heat. It's nothing next to what I recall of, say, Michigan's humid torpor, or the full Venusian furnace of Louisiana heat. So it doesn't bother me - yet; perhaps my body will grow more sensitive to this light stress.

I do all of this in external silence, but my ears are filled with podcasts. My old, tiny mp3 player has Barbara Nussbaum and Radiolab, Escape Pod and The Memory palace. Discussions are the tiny, utterly close soundtrack of my work.

The compost grows in a day like this, and I feel vastly satisfied. Yes, there's clearly some kind of Freudian dynamic here. But there's also the positive sense of turning waste into product, recovering usefulness from what I used to disregard. On top of this is the longer duration pleasure of slowly, so slowly, building good soil. The Nearings and some of our fellow Riptonites speak of improving our land by many years, by decades - a daunting prospect, but one satisfying in small steps.

I (Bryan) travel a great deal, often by air, and I miss these hours of working the land more with each season. Greater practice and research on the homestead means I think about this stuff more often when I'm doing something elsewhere. It's the stuff of cliche, really - the weirdness of turning a switch to alter my local climate, the strange lack of connection to food processing (either production or disposal), the sad absence of animals. Every airport stay, every airplane ride makes my back ache to schlep a big rock, or saw some wood.

And how late this all is! With all of our work, it's not enough. We can grow enough food to live for a little while, but are still dependent on buying stuff we can't raise, or can't raise enough of. We aim to be able to grow enough food to live on for a year, like Barbara Ganley can with her awesome spread, down in the valley. But we're not there yet.

Working on the land in late June

It's the last day of June, and the homestead is humming along.  On days like this the sun just pours across the sky.  It's delicious to just stand in the afternoon light, soaking up the brilliance.  Or to simply sprawl and doze, like the cats are doing.

We've harvested some radishes.  They grow quickly and can start early in the year.  These Ceredwyn planted in May:

Three of us love eating 'em, so radishes are a win.  They are hardy, too, capable of surviving May's occasional bouts of snow and freezing temperatures.

Meanwhile we nurture our potato plants, which just sprouted up a couple of weeks ago.  Nurturing them involves weeding, of course, and also hilling: adding compost and soil onto their stalks, building up a little hill around each plant.  That encourages them to grow longer stems and roots, often yielding more potatoes.

On the western edge of our cleared land the tomato plants grow, each in its car-tire-enclosed bunch of warm compost and soil.

Over in the north plot, the three sisters (corn, beans, squash) have started to grow, even though we only planted them a week ago.  The bean plants in particular have soared up out of the soil.

The tiny corn shoot is in the center, dwarfed for now by the bean plants above.

Nothing bad to report now: no blight, no thieving animals.

Attack planting!

Onward to the soil!  Everything came together last weekend: no snow, no ice, no rain. Instead we basked in warm weather, and pried loose some precious unscheduled hours.  So we plunged into planting.

Digging: we re-dug the plot we created last year, the one on the rise just below the house.  We used shovels to dig down about one foot, carving long rows.  Rocks kept coming up, so they were added to piles for later use. Then we dug in compost from our 2009 pile, black and soft; this plot is still clay-ey, and desperately needs good stuff added to it.

We re-dug potato trenches in the big old plot, pulling out rocks and the occasional, surprising old potato (always in good shape, too).  Compost from a really old bin got tipped in, too: brown trenches lined with black.

Onions and garlic sprouted in their rows, planted by Ceredwyn last fall.  Green stalks bravely towering from dirt are a deeply heartening sight.

Other already-growing plants were glorious to behold in the bright sun.  The young apple tree, just forcing out little blossoms aimed at summer fruiting and fall fullness.  The grass across our lower lawn, set up last fall.

May's forests

It's May, and suddenly the trees have all leafed out.

Looking west, downslope behind the house.

It's shocking, really, to see the horizon close up in a few days.  Half a year we've enjoyed open views of the ridges and slopes, barely graces by the thin boles of maple and birch.  The canopy was notional, easily overcrowded by skies.

But it's May, and spring has done its rapid work.  The air is rich, luxuriant - not hot, or humid.  Breezes feel like delayed guests, stronger for having labored through arboreal mazes.

Now we drop to our knees to build up compost.  Weeds need pulling, grass cutting, and overhead branches cut back: a bonus of verdure, continuous green heaps for the three compost stacks.

A glance at 1866

This homesteading schedule feels familiar to me, even thought it's from 1866:

sugaring in the spring; planting oats, wheat, potatoes, beans in May; shearing sheep and “drawing muck”—spreading of manure in June; harvesting hay in July and August and cutting oats and wheat; In September cutting corn, picking apples, and marketing sheep and lambs.  In October and November, husking corn, plowing and picking and drawing stone.  

Sugaring spring - well, February or early March, yes.  Not this year, but check.
Planting in May - we do the third and fourth of those, but not the first two.  Check.
Manure in June - not yet.  Animal manure goes into the compost all year.
Hay and cutting - not stuff we do.
Cutting and picking in September - yes, into October.  No marketing of animals, but killing some.
Husking, plowing, picking - plowing under, yes.  Prepping some food, yes.  (What is "drawing stone"?)

What a new connection this is, a resonance across a century and a half.  The differences are clear, especially based on our different crop emphasis.

How we grow potatoes, one way

Potatoes are one of our major crops, up here on the mountain homestead.  We've been working on them for years, trying different permutations in order to maximize yield.

Here's one, which we borrowed from urban gardening: the humble potato barrel.  The concept is simple: plant potato seeds* at the bottom of a barrel.  As the plants grow, add soil or compost.  When the growing season is done, upend or break open the barrel then pick out the spuds from the results.

We piloted this last year with a couple of plastic barrels, and things went well. The plants grew rapidly, and escaped any touches of disease our other crops experienced.  The end result was a nice pile of tubers.

So this year we expanded the potato barrel project, using every available container:

Mid-May

Five are standing, while one lays sideways, as you can see.  I (Bryan) hauled the barrels together, then Ceredwyn started the seeds:

So far they're coming along nicely.

*potato seeds are actually chunks of potatoes.  They need at least one eye to work.

Into a season of whiteness and storms

We just entered the snowstormy phase of winter.  January through March is when snowfall is frequent enough to not be remarkable.   The temperature sometimes stays well below freezing for a while, like it did earlier this week, which keeps snow already on the ground from freezing.  Occasionally the temp lifts up to the 30s, which seems to summon snow out of eager-to-appear clouds.

So white is and will remain the major landscape theme for a while. This is when the ground is deeply blanketed in white, and that blanket's upper level rises steadily. Snowbanks and drifts are just parts of the landscape.  Trees, cars, fences, outbuildings are always covered. We cut and recut trails and trenches for daily routines: to the chicken house, the wood piles, the lower compost pile, the main sledding cut.

It's also the season of continuous ice.  Ice sneaks under snow and crusts on top of it.  Bodies of water are partly or entirely covered with ice, as Charlie Hohn reminds us.

About once a month comes a huge storm, and we prepare like our southern friends do against a hurricane: stockpiling emergency supplies, assuming a loss of electricity.  We've been lucky so far.

Naturally we're not growing any crops now.  In fact now is when our autumn harvests become even more precious.  Each potato feels like a victory against the suspension of growing, a treat stolen from time.  And yet the limitations of our larder remind us how far we have to go in becoming self-sustaining.  That's a goad for our spring planting planning: more plots, more plants!

Meanwhile, Ceredwyn's chicken house light hack continues to bear fruit, er, eggs. Every night we see the solar-powered lights glow, illuminating brave hens.  Every morning Ceredwyn hauls hot water out to the coop, and brings back eggs, like this tremendous haul from two days (!):

So we keep feeding ourselves even in this Nordic time: fresh eggs from chilly chickens, potatoes from storage, chicken meat from the freezer.  Progress.

Mid-September notes

Greetings from mid-September. The homestead is hip-deep in autumn. Some highlights:

Temperatures are falling. In the 50s F during the day, now; down to 40 at night.

We turned one big compost pile, to get it rotting into spring:

Chickens continue to grow. A bunch of the meat birds are huge, and awaiting destiny shortly.

And our local, excellent contractor built us a new front door plus porch:

Gwynneth strides off of it:

Last call in the garden

Spent this weekend harvesting the last from the garden and planting garlic.

I brought in carrots and stored them. Found some volunteer onions and pulled up the last of the broccoli to give to the goats. Other stuff I pulled up to throw on the compost heap. Bryan raked leaves for the last time this year.

The Neo pagan holiday cycle makes a great deal of sense at this latitude. Samhain is the counted as the beginning of the new year. For an agrarian society, this makes a great deal of sense. It is the Feast of the Last Harvest. Anything worth harvesting should already have been harvested and the garden put to sleep. The symbolism of celebrating the dead is fairly obvious. It is the beginning of many hunting seasons and one of the best times for butchering large animals outside (they'll cool quickly in these temperatures).

On the homestead, we turn our thoughts and labors to inside work now. Cozy, evenings spent near the fire, in the glow of the computer screen...

Early May, first touches of growing

I just walked around our land in some very cold (40s F) rain, checking out growing things.  Here's where we are, days after the snow vanished:

Garlic: a whole row has risen, new shoots sticking up greenly in the drizzle.

Apple tree: blossoms budding on branches.

Grass: shady grass seed has sprouted in the lowest lawn, a creation of last fall.

Meanwhile, each compost pile collapsed down about a foot.  It's the interior ice thawing out, at last.

The dirt looks good for digging.  Now for the rain to let up.

Hitting the limits of homesteading: some thoughts on septic

What can't we do ourselves?  What are the limits of homesteading practice?

We ran up against some of those limits this fall, and they smelled bad.  Yes, readers, we had a septic crisis.  We blogged it a little bit, earlier.  Short version: we replaced our entire septic system.

Note that sentence's active voice.  Passive voice is more appropriate, as in "we had our septic system replaced."  Because we couldn't do it ourselves.  From start to finish, we were simply passive spectators and paymasters (i.e., debtors).

Machine dropping boulders.

At best we did some manual labor, just to clear the way.  We relocated a couple of compost piles, hauled around a bunch of rocks, ended one sweet flower garden.

Here's the problem.  Septic work is very resource-intensive.  It requires very specialized knowledge, rare skills, and big machines.  None of these are readily accessible to the average homesteader.  It would take a long, long time to get good enough with an excavator, for example... assuming we'd have access to one (we didn't), and know how where to dig (ditto).  Or consider the septic tank, a huge construction of concrete, steel, and plastic. A new septic tank isn't something we have the skills or tools to make.  That's an industrial-age artifact.  Or assessing the land to make a plan: we're intimately familiar with our land, and know enough technology (GIS) to start to make a basic map.  But we're not surveyors, so we had to hire someone skilled who could stomp around with lasers and other equipment.  And an excavator-driving genius.  Ultimately, we had to pay for many someones, by the end of the thing, along with lots of equipment and material.

One part of the work: ad hoc road cut through the land.

The only way to obtain these things is through money, and lots of it.  Barter won't do.  Giving eggs or hours of labor won't pay for a smidgen of septic work. Paying for it out of our monthly expenses budget: nowhere near the costs. Instead, we ended up running further into debt, in a big way, to stage the whole thing.  This meant Bryan had to add more work on top of his current job to start paying for it.  We plunged further into the financial world, deepening what we owe, and reversing our previous direction of reducing debts.

The old rank, ripped out and crushed.

Another homesteading problem: this project was an involuntary one, triggered by a hidden failure we couldn't anticipate.  Septic tank, pipes, the leach field all live underground.  They don't send date to our home network, because they don't have sensors.  Septic overhaul is not something homesteaders can do on demand, just because they want to.  "Say, let's add a new cold frame!"  No.

When septic fails, you have to fix or replace it asap, for health reasons.  Moreover, recently implemented Vermont state regulations require massive work to bring a home's septic up to snuff - i.e., not just replacing, but aggressively expanding and improving.  Which is a good thing for the environment.  Therefore we risked serious penalties, both financial (fines) and practical (stinking sludge, followed by health problems), until the thing was redone.

So we couldn't do it by hand.  We couldn't afford it normally.  It wasn't something we chose.  On top of that, this was also something we had to do offline.  Yes, we could research septic online, which was very helpful.  But blogging about it during the process risked drawing attention to its incompletion, risking fines.   So we were told by folks who've lived here much longer, and work in the government world.  That process took several months, meaning two seasons of social media silence.  We live online, in many ways.  The Web is essential to how we learn, share our work, get feedback, network.  We shared small, even cryptic hints via Facebook updates, one (1) post here, some Flickr images.  But essentially this septic thing had to happen asocially, in darkness, buried.

Spot the buried tank.

When we describe this process, we sometimes compare it to going through a dangerous medical crisis.  Like recovering from a heart attack, it's expensive, time-consuming, impossible to do (successfully) on your own. And when you're done? ...you're right back where you started.  The cardiac survivor isn't healthier.  Our homestead doesn't have some super-septic.  The difference is being out a lot of money, or being deeply in debt.  Very little learned, and nothing through hands-on work.  I know a little more about septic systems, but am nowhere near being able to dig the right trench, or site a leach field.

I (Bryan) am still mad about it.  I understand the benefits of a functioning septic system, of course.  Ceredwyn regaled me with horror stories about bad septic in Haiti.  But the costs burn, especially given the longer hours I work.  Worse yet, and most instructive, is the hard limit to our homesteading.  This is something like electrical power, or surgery, or automative construction: essential, irreplaceable, and way beyond our abilities.

Tomatoes in July

We continue our tomato growing this year, with good results so far.

How do we grow the red lovelies on a mountaintop, during a short season?  First, we start from seedlings.  We'd like to try seeds, but haven't been able to get the right environment for them yet.  Cold frame or greenhouse: that might help.

Second, we prepare beds.  Most are old tires, which are terrific: black, so retaining heat; a few inches high, so keep the soil up a bit.  We also made some extra beds with rocks.  Then poured in compost, into which the seedlings settled.  Then added frames for them to grow up:

As of today, each has either flowers or little fruits.

PS: by "us" I (Bryan) mean Ceredwyn.  These are her babies; she did all the work.

Thinking on the lawn

I've been thinking about our lawns of late. Ceredwyn and I are a bit conflicted about maintaining any spaces of short grass, partly for reasons of time - any lawn here is tricky to work on, since our land is mostly sloped, and sports many tricky features: trees, roots, rocks large and small, moving animals, multiple garden plot boundaries and wood piles. It's also hard to get the kids to take a hand, typically.

There's also the argument that lawns are simply bad in terms of household economy. They take up water, time, and space, all of which could be better allocated towards sustainability efforts. And we have followed this argument to its logical conclusion at several points - this year I tore up a fine lawn spot on a well-lit spot, turning it into our new potato patch (and moving the sod to a shadowy location).

So why do we keep up any yards of flattish green? A few thoughts, mulled during yesterday's mowing before the rain.

-accessible avenues. We humans simply use these lawns every day to get places. Hauling wood, taking food to goats, carting compost stuff, we cross the grass. Longer grass would ultimately be a problem, since it conceals obstacles (of which we accumulate plenty, with falling bits of trees and whatever the dog leaves about).

Yes, there are alternatives. Grass-less dirt paths are terrific, and I've made and maintained a network of these (more in another post)... but note that I wrote "maintained". They need to be kept clear of fallen debris, and also weeded. Gravel is useful, but expensive, and we need to dedicate our efforts there towards our driveway (also another post). Paving is awful. Flat stones can be sweet, and I'm working on one right now, but it takes some time to build anything. Lawn swaths, in the meantime, simply work.

-aesthetic variation. The lawn patches appeal to me because they're different from most of what we see up here.

It's the opposite of the suburban lawn cult. I've never been fond of those inter-house greens, iterating across subdivisions in patchwork. Up here in Ripton, though, it's a different matter. Most of the visual scene is covered in trees, not grass. We see more dirt than grass, often enough. The eye detects leaves and wood, mostly. Which isn't bad, of course. That display sets off lawns by texture and angle, planes of variation. Lawn patches are interesting, pleasant.

-the satisfaction of work. I admit to feeling pleased by the feeling of having finished moving, of seeing the myriad exposed blade-tips and fallen tops. It's a simple pleasure, akin to that felt when completing cleaning a room, or tidying a mass of stuff: tangible accomplishment. Also the image, that satisfaction, can persist for a while, as the grass slowly grows back. To say nothing of the sensual delight of the scent of newly mown grass.

That shadowy patch I mentioned above, which I sodded? It's a thrill - a small one, but still - to see the grass growing enough to be mown. It was a mixed space of dirt and weeds previously.

What do you think? Is our lawnwork nonetheless a problem for sustainability? Are we being foolish, or is this sensible?

-Bryan

(photo from Kevin Dooley)

June planting; minding the spuds

It's mid-June, which means hilling up potatoes.

Let me explain.  Potatoes grow in two phases, simplified a bit.  First, they push up stems and leaves above the ground, in the way we expect most plants to do.  Green stems extend upwards towards the sun, leaves appearing along them.  This classic upwards foliation goes on for a while, then stops, leading to the second phase.  That's when the plant turns away from the surface world (literally, the leaves droop), and spends all of its energies underground, plumping up roots into gradually thickening tubers - i.e., the taters we eat.

Potato plants in the upper plot

To help these plants make as many big spuds as possible, we need the plants to grow as much as possible, which means assisting the first phase by helping each plant grow taller.  That way they have more energy and more underground room to make more potatoes.

We do that by "hilling". When a plant extrudes another few inches upwards, we gently shovel some soil around it, leaving about an inch of remaining stalk above the earth's new top.  We check back every few days, and repeat the process if the plant keeps on getting taller.

The results are ever-ascending mounds, with potato plants poking out of the top.  Once this phase stops, each plant fills up their human-made mound with spuds (ideally).

Readers of this blog may recall that we're growing potatoes in three different ways this year: in dirt, in mulch, and in barrels.  Hilling works for all three.  I just described the all-dirt method.  For the mulch-bedded tater plants, we hill with more mulch hauled in from the goat/chicken shed (those animals continue adding to our homestead, months and years after their demise).  For the barrels, we add more compost, carefully dropped in between plant and barrel wall.

There's something deeply satisfying about seeing these mounds rise.  It's a physical, tangible sign of successful growing.  Each mount becomes a ministorehouse of potatoes to come, in my imagination.  And while what often comes next - plants pushing even higher from atop their new mounds - means a call to more work, that's also a sign of progress.

Each plant is also a reminder of winter to come.  I see the gleaming green leaves, and am achingly aware of how short-lived they are, how brutally important the tubers beneath are for survival.  Hilled-up mounds are ultimately hedges against starvation.