Humble Garden

Yesterday and today, the first of six raised beds has been built. They will be lined at the bottom with wire mesh to keep out the burrowing rodentia. They are lined on the sides to keep the wood from leaching chemicals into our food. On top of the wire mesh are radiant flooring heating tubing which will heat the beds in the winter. The tubing will be filled with polypropylene glycol (PPG) that circulates into a heat exchange manifold associated with the biomass generator/boiler.

Here is the raised bed from our back door.

We are having to bring in fill to create a level surface in our backyard for the raised beds. We learned that this fill, which is palm sized smooth rocks and black earth, is the scrape from a nearby dairy farm that has been sold and is being torn down for a subdivision. Crimes!We will benefit from this because this fill has loads of cow manure and, oddly enough, cow bones (think calcium). The story is that when a cow has passed away, the farmer takes the carcass out into the pasture and lets nature re-assimilate it. The bones we come across look pretty old and moldy, well taken care of by the elements.

We live on 16 acres and have, until now, been very light on the land. We built our house 11 years ago and have not done anything else with the land. We have always looked out the back windows and wondered when we might begin to make a garden and a kid-safe play area.

I have tried gardening the soil and the forest floor is completely unarable. If you try to even dig a small hole, the roots make the ground like iron. We also have extensive ledge that makes it hard to do much of anything but build raised beds.

We are moving even closer now to self-grown organic veggies, meats, and eggs, year round!

This spring we are getting a slow start with planting for at least two reasons:

• I have not been too inspired to do the deck container gardening, I cant really say why, I just cant.
• We are finally getting our backyard “reformatted” so that we can build the beginning of our self-sufficiency gardens.

What I mean by that is that we will be building/installing/configuring:

• A high efficiency biomass electrical generator