Humble Garden

Today is Tuesday and the first day in a while that work can get done because its been raining cats and dogs here.

Fill and top soil – loam continues to come although today the dump truck got stuck in our soft lawn, no more until tomorrow.

Here are a few shots of how the raised beds are coming along today.

There is some interpersonal “excitement” going on right now with the construction team, its possible we may have to finish the other two beds and the whole chicken house ourselves.

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.