Building a passive solar greenhouse

The chard outside in the garden is frozen and wilted. I hear it will perk right back up, but as of the moment, it's lookin' pretty sad.

What would be better this time of year than a nice, passive-solar greenhouse out in the garden. Here is a great link from the Bradford Research and Extension Center, University of Missouri, showing plans and instructions and design concepts for a very straightforward passive solar greenhouse.

An illustration with the basic concepts [click picture for a better view]:



The solar gain off of those water barrels is amazing.

So, for the serious geeks out there, here is the page with the construction details and materials list.

Enjoy dreams of season extension in the garden,

Bp

Wild Kingdom in our back yard: Katydid about to get eaten by Miranda

I have a thing with Carnivorous plants. They're just too cool.

Last Mother's Day I sent The Wife to the local Orchid show with some money and said "get something that makes you happy." It was her first Mother's Day after all. She came home with the most amazing plant -- a Nepenthes Miranda Asiatic cobra plant. It's gorgeous.

I must plug Sarracenia Northwest here. They are a local Portland Oregon plant nursery that specializes in carnivorous plants. I'm happy they had a display at the Orchid show so the wife could run into this impressive plant. If you ever had an itch to get a carnivorous plant, click that link and see just how much variety and information they provide.

So -- on to the video.

Today when I came home for lunch I saw a bright green leaf on one of the pitchers. Then I saw it move. I got closer and saw that it was a Katydid. I've never seen one in our area so Miranda did quite a job of luring him in from who-knows-where. Amateur video to follow.



And the video in which I find out my flip camera software has no "rotate left" option in its edit options. Sorry 'bout that, but I'm posting it anyway.



Enjoy beautiful plants eating bugs,

Bp


[photograph via Petflytrap]

Update on the Mushroom Tree

As I was out feeding the chickens this morning, I spotted something kinda gross looking, and potentially very exciting.

Last fall, some of you may remember, I got the idea to inoculate a stump in our chicken yard with wild edible mushrooms. Due to the species of the tree, I chose Chicken of the Woods mushrooms (Laetiporus sulphureus), and set about plugging the stump.

The beautiful bloom depicted on the right is not the stump in my back yard, but a bit of a dream picture of what it could look like as early as this fall.

Below is a picture of the state of the "dry" or "inactive-looking" plugs in the stump. If you click it to get a better view, you can see a number of the dowels sticking out from the bark, looking quite "dowelly", and not super biologically active.



And next are two picture of what look to me to be fully active, early-stage spots of growth at some of the "active" plugs. Unless this is newbish ignorance, like some kind of successful immune-response from the stump, I believe we have liftoff. They are even a creamy orange color, which fits the species of mushroom I chose to grow in this stump.





Enjoy turning waste wood into beautiful food,

Bp

[top picture courtesy of Wiki Commons]

The most probable Colony Collapse Disorder culprit yet

So that last post I made about a possible CCD agent is on pretty thin ice, it turns out. This pesticide, however (imidacloprid) looks very seriously like a possible cause. In this Salon.com article, they present some pretty compelling information.

Bayer CropScience, the producer of both imidacloprid and another suspect pesticide clothianidin, doesn't want you to think this, however. They've got big money on the association between CCD and their products just going away.

Although I can't say that case connecting these pesticides and CCD is waterproof, it sure deserves a WHOLE LOT of attention.

Enjoy possibly finding the solution to a problem with one of our most important agricultural animals,

Bp

[image credit in linked article]

Installing a Nuc in my back-yard bee hive

Here is a series of photos showing me installing a nuc in my back-yard hive.

The term "Nuc" is short for Nucleus Hive. It is basically a box containing 3-6 frames which include not only a good number of bees and a queen, but brood cells (I.E. baby bees) as well. The presence of the brood cells means that the bees aren't going to pick up and move any time soon, because there are youngin's to take care of.

In my understanding, the advantage of installing a Nuc instead of a "package" is because the queen has a head start producing new bees (a 21-day process) and the hive can get down to business quicker than the package bees can. A package, however, has many more bees to work for their queen.

My experience last year with package bees and top-bar hives (basically, they took their queen and left -- "absconded") led me to the conclusion that for my next attempt, I was going to use a Langstroth hive (I.E. "standard") so I could start it with a Nucleus instead of a package. Bees with babies just don't abscond.

Here is what I had laid out before I started the process: the nuc (the waxed cardboard container there, they are also often in wood containers), my hive and stand on its screen bottom-board, extra frames, pollen pack (in the wax paper on the ground), and a frame feeder (the black "frame" inside the hive at the top).


Here is a view into the prepped hive, showing the gap I left (turned out I needed to remove one more frame as the nuc had 5 frames, not 4 as I expected) to receive the nucleus frames. You can see the screen at the bottom there -- screen bottom boards are becoming standard as they allow both debris and especially mites to fall through and not get back up into the hive.


Opening the nuc.


A couple pictures of carefully pulling frames from the nuc box (I pulled two at a time when I could) and installing them in my hive.





Tapping bees from the nuc box into my hive.


The hive, closed up, with the nuc box set nearby so the remaining bees could make their way into the hive. There is a lot of queen scent in the nuc box so if there were a lot of bees the next day still in the box I was going to do another "tap" into the top of the hive. As it turns out there weren't very many so I didn't feel the need to do this. I wanted to let the hive alone for a bit to settle in.



A note on feeding the new hive: I used one package of pollen and 8 quarts of syrup to feed the hive as a precaution. Although the weather has been variable lately, I didn't want to trust that there'd be good flying weather any time soon after the install. This way if they need the food it's there, if they don't -- well, who doesn't need food when you're starting a new project, right? There was already tons of forage nearby for the bees to work if they did fly (maple, hawthorne, apple and comfrey to name a few) so I didn't feed a lot, nor do I expect I'll need to feed any more this season.

The bees look dandy and I'll post reports as the project progresses.

Enjoy pursuing your passions,

Bp

Urban Homesteading -- not just in the Portland Bubble

I was very pleased to see this New York Times article talking about the steadily gaining popularity of backyard livestock in urban and suburban areas of the East Coast and Midwest. Goat and bees were mentioned as well as the ubiquitous backyard chickens.

It seems that laws are being changed around the country to accommodate this lifestyle. As a natural extension of a home garden, a couple animals or backyard livestock only makes sense. Portlanders are all over this, with our coop tours and whatnot. I love it.

I'm often shocked when I start making assumptions about the rest of the country based on what I see in my home town. I'll see a push (albeit hard-fought) for public transportation, or bicycle access, for instance, and then travel elsewhere in the country and find these things utterly non-existent. Not that I think Portland is some paragon of how to do it right -- not by any means. But it is a progressive city as far as the U.S. goes, so it's nice to see one of our little citizen-led green movements actually getting a foothold in the rest of the country as well.

Thanks Nana Povi for sending me the article.

Enjoy knowing where your food came from,

Bp

[photo credit in linked article]

Bee Time + Eddie Izzard on Bees

Spring is not just Garden Time and Nettle Time -- it's Bee Time. I'm excited.

I went down to Ruhl Bee Supply with Estu to pick up his hives, equipment, and some packages of Carniolans. He, too, will be mixing a Langstroth hive into his home bee keeping, while continuing to work with his Top Bar hive.

I still need to assemble my Langstroth for the garden, and paint it, before I get a nuc to ensure a nice solid take with the new bees. I'm very excited, only a couple weeks and I'll be in business.

Looks like I'll be lending out two of my top bar hives to friends, and will keep one to gather a swarm into this season. The idea is to see if there is any way they'll stay in a top bar up in its current location -- it would be fantastic if they'd stay, because I could get a few hives up there without much trouble at all.

Anyway, plans and dreams aside, below is a great Eddie Izzard skit about bees to finish off this post.



Enjoy the care and feeding of small creatures,

Bp

Spring starts for the garden -- plants and animals

We lose our breakfast nook in certain seasons. Spring is a big one -- it's a nice south-facing 3-windowed space, practically a greenhouse. T. does his starts there and begins the hardening process, and this year we have chicks too.

The starts in the picture are too numerous to name -- but a good mix of veggies and flowers.

The wee ones are a mix of Australorps, a very pretty black chicken with green iridescence in the feathers, very steady laying breed; Silver-laced Wyandottes, a hearty laying hen with amazingly beautiful plumage; and the special rare-breed, Delawares. Looks like the new generational theme in the flock is black and white formal.

Whenever we raise chicks, we raise many more than we'll ever need because there are always folks looking for pullets later in the season. Plus, our friends up on the mountain have a ravening band of mutt chickens in a big forest enclosure, and any new breed to add to the mix just makes their flock hybrids stronger. There's always room for more up there.

And we have the roughest chore too -- to pick up and play with the chicks a lot as they're growing up. It's a tough one, but we suck it up and do it. We've found that the adult chickens are so much easier to deal with if the chicks get handled and talked to a lot. Jobs like catching them to clip wings and check feet are much less noisy and dramatic.





Enjoy bad photography of lovely spring garden tasks,

Bp

Dirt! the movie

This book turned me on to the subtleties and importance of dirt: Dirt: The Ecstatic Skin of the Earth. And now there's a movie that does the same: Dirt! the Movie.

As even the preview below asserts, dirt is one of the most important factors to life on earth. It doesn't get more fundamental than that. This is why our house buys organic products. It's not only because there are health benefits for us, but more importantly it directly pays farmers to take care of the soil. If you don't pay people to do something, how can you expect them to do it?

Check out the trailer, it looks awesome.



Enjoy learning more about the systems that directly sustain you,

Bp

[via Uncle Tom]

Victory gardens, the white house lawn, and eattheview.org

A young friend of mine turned me on to the video below. It is a quick overview of a man who supports converting some of the white house lawn into a vegetable garden putting his money where his mouth is. He puts a victory garden on his own front lawn. The video has some good quotes and information, for instance at one point in time (WWII) over 20 million Americans had victory gardens and produced 40% of America's fresh food.

The video, in turn, led me to the Eat The View homepage. This is the web base of operations for folks who are encouraging the incoming administration to do something productive with a section of the White House Lawn. There are some great links, including a history of the lawn and past presidents' relationship to gardens, vegetables, and food. This isn't the first time a scheme like this has been hatched. There is also, of course, a petition to sign as well.



If you are enthused with the Victory Garden idea, here are a few more links:

Maybe Victory Gardens can save the U.S. again

San Francisco's Victory Garden

The Victory Garden wiki entry

Enjoy being that much more self sufficient, and cutting down waste, and producing tasty food that only a home garden can provide,

Bp

[via the lovely Fionna]

Nuking a blog: The 17 Gardens of the Outer Nethers

I really loved the name of that blog. It was Doc Ock's kid who walked around our property when he was 8 years old, and afterward announced that he had counted 17 whole gardens in our yard. I started to correct him and say "those are beds, like parts of gardens" but then stopped myself. "Yep, you are exactly right, there are 17 gardens here!"

Anyway, in the Summer of 2007, I was a young and impetuous blogger and thought that I would need a separate blog as an occasional place to post the tons and tons of garden photos I was planning to take. As it turns out, I needed to finish school, and work, and take care of the house, as WELL AS blog. So that blog is no longer needed. I'll post all the garden related posts here instead.

Below, pictures of the front yard, the front gate, and one of T's amazing bouquets -- all from The 17 Gardens of the Outer Nethers blog, 2007.





Enjoy realizing that even more of your interests can be accommodated by a single, personal blog,

Bp

Photo essay: creating a "Mushroom Tree"

As I mentioned last month, we are going to attempt to grow wild mushrooms in our back yard. I ordered 300 plugs of Chicken of the Woods spawn from Fungi Perfecti.

The first picture is of the bag of plug spawn.


The second is the back of the bag, showing a healthy bunch of plugs.


The third is looking into the bag, seeing a nice, healthy cottony network of mycelium around all the plugs. The instructions were to let the box and spawn sit for up to a month before using so the mycelium could recover from the shipping. When it looked this way, I decided it was ready to go.


The next picture shows a 5/16" drillbit and a few holes in the "diamond" pattern suggested in the 10-page booklet supplied by Fungi Perfecti. The bit was around 4 1/2" long, and I was shooting for a distance of 3-4" between holes -- so used it as a rough measure.


Next is 4 plugs set in the holes, and only the top one pounded in. I used a finish hammer for this, as I couldn't find our rubber mallet.

Next is a typical "field" of plugs. My impression is that you want fields like this, as opposed to thin runs in the wood. The plug spawn grows out from the spot where it was introduced until it reaches the next one growing out from another location. When the mycelium reach each other, they bind up and support each other's growth -- so wide fields of plugs are better than thin paths.


The last picture is the incipient Mushroom Tree itself. I did a nice wide collar of plugs about 4' off the ground all around the trunk (out of reach of chickens, who I think would go after the young mushrooms), then a nice wide stripe all the way up the front to a collar around the top. When it blooms (anywhere from 6-12 months from now), it's going to look totally cool.

Chicken of the Woods (Laetiporus sulphureus) mushrooms are not only edible, but really bright and beautiful -- check out these links for good pictures: Wikipedia, American Mushrooms.com, and some doozies from the New Jersey Mycological Association.

Enjoy creating edible art in your garden,

Bp

Guerilla gardening in London with Richard Reynolds

I love guerrilla gardening. This guy's attitude is great, and the mini-doc is entertaining. Here is a teaser quote from Mr. Reynolds and the video:

"The point at which I became a guerrilla gardener is when I realized that I would get a lot more accomplished by just getting out there and doing it than phoning up the council and complaining about the landscape all around me."



Enjoy simple, kind, and creative activities you can do to improve your neighborhood and break the law at the same time,

Bp

[via Boing Boing]

Making mushrooms out of lemonade... er

As you can see from the sidebar, I've been reading Paul Stamets's book Mycelium Running. This has me thinking about mushrooms and mushroom cultivation.

SO -- we had this Blue Spruce in the chicken yard that was dying. Possibly beetle infestation. We had our friend who is an arborist cut the tree down, leaving the stump good and tall so we could use it as a framing member.

And then I realized: we could inoculate it with mushrooms!!!

It's a conifer, and not one that grows in our area, so I don't know what mushroom would be best to grow in it. I'm going to use Fungi Perfecti's plug spawn to do it. I'm thinking Chicken of the Woods or the Conifer Coral. I called Fungi Perfecti and told them the situation, and Paul his'self is going to get back to me with his suggestions.

I'm thinking Chicken of the Woods growing in the chicken yard has a certain poetic ring to it. I'll report back when I hear from the fungal superstar.

Bp

Ps/Addendum: Fungi Perfecti got back to me, Chicken of the Woods it is. We were leaning that way anyway, because of the crazy neon color and the poetic nature of chickens growing with the chickens.

Ginormous orchid blooms, plant freaks swoon

I'll let the article speak for itself (click on quoted text for full article):

Considered “The Queen of Orchidaceous Plants,” and one of the world’s largest orchids, this particular Grammatophyllum speciosum is 12 feet in diameter and weighs about 200 pounds. It last bloomed in 2003 and has four huge flower spikes, at least one of which should remain in bloom for the next week or two, said David Horak, curator of the garden’s orchid collection.

Enjoy blog posts that make The Wife stand up and pay attention, even early in the morning,

Bp

[via Estu, photo credits in linked article]

A short course in Bovine methane production, an unintended guest post by Estu

Stud Farmhand posted this in the comments below, and it was awesome enough I figured I'd better make it a post of its own.

---------
A short course in bovine methane production:

Cow flatus is commonly cited as a significant contributor to global warming; as much as 18% of all methane produced worldwide comes from animals, with 90% of that coming from cud chewers (sheep, goats, camels, water buffalo, but mostly cattle)

There's a genetically engineered grass which, if fed to cattle, is claimed to reduce their methane emissions: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/05/080506120859.htm

(note that at least one country, Great Britain, includes plans to reduce bovine flatulence as part of its comprehensive plan to reduce greenhouse emissions.)

Here's another proposed solution to the problem: a methane trap developed in Argentina: http://www.physorg.com/news135003243.html

Finally, here's a project underway in California to use the methane released by cows to generate electricity:
http://www.autobloggreen.com/2008/03/05/no-bs-cow-sourced-methane-power-in-california/

And Stu's continued commentary, now on Horse manure:

Another related topic: horse manure and stall bedding are a significant problem. If simply piled up and left to rot, they add significant nitrogen to the soil and groundwater of surrounding areas. ANother option, hauling to landfills, simply relocates the problem to our already overflowing solid waste disposal systems.

Composting is effective but can be time- and labor-intensive.

There's a company in Snohomish, WA that makes fast-composting systems for stall bedding and horse manure: http://www.o2compost.com/content/Horse_Manure_Composting.htm

I have been using one of their micro-bin systems for the last year and am very pleased with the result: I can cure 16 cubic feet -- 1.75 cubic yards -- of used bedding and manure in 30 days. The company also claims that the system is effective for other forms of animal waster (sheep, poultry), household garbage (food waste, not trash) and for yard waste such as grass clippings.

Enjoy your friends geeking out eloquently on your blog,

Bp

[cow picture via burpless grass article, horse manure composter picture via O2compost.com]

Patrick Gracewood sculpture work up at Hughes Water Gardens

I am big fans of both Patrick's work and of Hughes Water Gardens -- so seeing his stuff at their place is a win/win for me. Here is one of the pieces, it was so well placed I had to share some photos. I think you've got some time left in the lily season to hit Hughes and see some fantastic blooms as well.




Enjoy talented friends,

Bp

P.U.H. -- the Portland Urban Hayseed

Sometimes, when I'm driving home with a couple bales of straw strapped to the roof of the Subaru, little kids wave while I'm on the freeway. This got me thinking, that must look a bit unusual. And the other day, when I finally cleaned out the back of said wagon, I coined a term in my head -- the Portland Urban Hayseed.

I had been driving around with 100 lbs. of chicken feed, multiple large jars and bowls for berry picking, a clam rake, and a bunch of scrap metal in the back seat. I had to keep remembering that it was temporarily a two-seater due to all the crap in the car. I laughed as I was unloading all the stuff and thought, "my god, what a hayseed" and Boom, a new epithet was born.

I know a few other folks who live the PUH lifestyle, and I think I'm going to run it past them, see if we can get it to stick.

[What's the photo have to do with being a Hayseed? I dunno, it was one of the wiki commons responses to a search for the word -- "a California Hayseed" it's called. Wiki commons photos can be used without fear of copyright infringement, so there we go.]

Enjoy the spawn of a new label,

Bp

Photography on Sod

Check out these "photos" using a patch of thick grass and photo negatives. I'll let the original Gizmodo post speak for itself:

Photosynthetic photography is by no means a new technique, but it's certainly new to us. By placing a "canvas" of grass in a darkroom and shining light on it that first passes through a film negative, artist/scientists have been able to tweak the chlorophyll levels of blades of grass and create living photographs. Their permanence is fleeting, but the effect is quite remarkable.

Enjoy different ways of doing things,

Bp

[via my Canukistani operative "Yuri"]

Laying hens produce cherries

You gotta love the N.E. Portland Backyard Barter economy in summertime.

Some of our delectable eggs,



Turned into these shiny beauties,





Enjoy bounty wherever you find it,

Bp