We have huge jugs

I wonder how many non-garden seeking hits this title will produce.

We made the first major step towards a new rain harvester. About a mile or so out of town is a Coca Cola bottling plant whose syrup comes in these beautiful 55-gallon plastic drums. They charge $10 a barrel to compensate the amount they lose from not having them recycled. We bought five.

The plan is to install the five barrels under the back deck which is just a few feet from the garden. To get the water from the harvester we'll have to rely on a small pump instead of gravity, but already we are devising a way to make the pump run on solar energy. I don't know, we'll see what happens when it happens. We're pretty stoked and we'll be sure to keep you posted.

Have a safe and happy 4th of July. Cheers.

New Lines

Our clothesline is up. This was the last major item we needed to address. Later in the season we will be constructing cold frames, but that can be put on hold for a little while. As you can also see in the photo, our plants are off to a very slow start. It really didn't help that our move prevented any planting until late May and the massive rains we've had have also brought things to a crawl. Last year the heat stuck around late in the season, so hopefully we will see a repeat of that and get a respectable amount of veggies in before winter.

We have been touring our local farmer's markets. We have gone without any grocery store produce for about a month now, which isn't all that impressive, but we are beginning to network and will hopefully be putting food by soon. We'll post some bits about this experience soon.

RIP Michael Jackson

Another Year, Another Trellis

Meg and I are always looking to improve our tomato trellises. Last year we did a string suspension system, which worked very well, and we will certainly try again, but at our new digs we are really aiming for space saving practices. The idea for this trellis came from some photos of the trellises over at Path to Freedom. At the moment I can't find any specific photos of their engineering, but if you hang around their site long enough, you're bound to see them.

We used some inexpensive plastic garden fence for the plants to climb. We'll have to make some of the holes bigger, but it should last us a long time.

Unfortunately the only part of the project that was made from reused material was a ten-foot piece of metal pipe we found in the basement. We'll get better with this as we learn what's available around us.

The trellis is about six and a half feet tall and each panel is four feet wide. We have a second set of panels to erect next to the ones in the photo, but we ran out of staples for the plastic fencing. We'll hit the hardware store tomorrow and call the project done.

And we're back

We have internet access and garden info.


As you all might recall, this was our back yard when we bought our new home. I didn't think to lift the screen before I snapped this photo, but we can still get the general idea (actually the idea is not exactly general; it's a flippin' yard and the photo is fine).


This little tidbit is what's available at the bottom of the first photo...


...and this is where we are now. Four of the five beds are complete. All that's left is to box in the dug up swath at the left of the photo. We have all the wood, but it hasn't stopped raining long enough to get them all done. The four beds that are complete are also planted as well. Since we missed the early part of the season, we did miss out on some greens and peas and whatnot. What we do have in are tomatoes, hot and sweet peppers, summer squash, winter squash, cucumbers, green beans, carrots, parsnips, turnips, chard, flowers, and a boat load of herbs. Most of what is in has been direct seeded, so we won't really see the patchwork for another week or so.


I don't believe it would be right if we didn't give a grateful nod to the Bethlehem compost heap. As residents of the City of Bethlehem we have free access to a mountain of organic compost provided by the borough. The materials for this beautiful resource are supplied by the leaves from Fall clean up.

The rest of these photos were taken during random stages of the dig.

Unbelievable

'Sup

I'm sitting in our fairly empty apartment. The move is almost over. Meg placed an order with the internet folks in our new area and they said we will be up and running by Friday the fifth (is the fifth on a Friday?). I guess that means we won't be in touch for another week and a half. Then again, we haven't been the best of blog hosts lately; have we? Our sporadic posts have not been without due cause. There has been a lot of cool shit going on around here and we can't wait to get it caught up on the ol' blog.

What's to come:
The semester has come to a successful close (it's sad, but exciting), I was in another ceramics wood firing, which I must say the results were absolutely amazing, my little brother made an extraordinary life changing decision, and yeah, for the first time ever, Meg and I are FUCKING HOMEOWNERS. So, hold on to your "oh shit" bars, because this summer ought to be interesting.

I had a run in, run around and run down

Bertha has joined her sisters in that great coop in the sky. She hadn't been feeling well so Meg took her to the vet where we learned the little girl had cancer. Apparently cancer is common with egg laying chickens. You gotta figure they're reproducing cells on a large scale, daily, and I guess all it takes is that one freak cell to ruin the whole works.

The vet said that she had about a week to live; so a decision was made to stop the suffering and at around 11:30 today Bertha was put to sleep.

For those of you who have been hangin' out with us, you know that our chickens were all named after Grateful Dead tunes. This is the last of our three little tributes.



We're retiring the chicken tag for a while. Where we're moving (holy shit, I almost forgot, we closed on our house last Friday) chickens are on the city's "not cool" list. We still plan to build our own farm someday and when that time comes the tag will be dug out and dusted off.

Our semesters are coming to a close soon, so be prepared for a fresh new season of FHF. Cheers all.

Chicken a la Tupperware

Bertha has been acting under the weather, so we (I) let her camp out in our bathroom for the past few days. Mostly she's been sprawled on a towel in her box, looking pathetic, but this morning I found her kicking around in her food dish. Looks like Bertha is on the mend.

Boxes

We've got almost all of our books, movies, and music packed up, with just a few piles still sitting around being read/watched/listened to. The variety of Victory boxes we've managed to save up actually makes me kind of proud. We've since added an empty Storm King Stout box, and it will gather up the stragglers as we pack up the last of our stuff.