Farm Beginnings: The End of the Beginnings for Sweet Showers Farm

This is my last posting about Farm Beginnings because I feel we have passed by the Beginnings part and are onto the beginning of the Doing part.

The Doing part, as you know, is the steady pace learning and exploration tango contained within every moment - you try corn on the lower field for the first time, the squash borer kills all of your cucumbers, goats escape (again), the strawberries are too wet, the chickens are decimated by a hawk, you hold a baby lamb as the sun rises, the sunflowers are pulled down because you planted your peas too quickly to trellis along and everything falls onto the pumpkins. (In the future, may all of my “problems" be as simple as sunflowers falling onto the pumpkins!)

We are calling our land Sweet Showers Farm, courtesy of my Chaucer days. Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote, The droghte of March hath perced to the roote. Sweet Showers Farm works two ways. The Sweet can be a noun showering down upon the Farm and/or the Sweet can be an adjective describing the Showers of rainfall. It makes me wiggily with happiness.

For my future questions there are many online resources to help me: Start2Farm.gov, Virtual Grange, Greenhorns, Beginning Farmers, Young Farmers Coalition, and I have been cultivating neighbor mentors.

Courtesy of my Permaculture Design Course (PDC), which I highly highly recommend as a way to recharge your educational, spiritual, and joy of life batteries, we have a farm plan and goals for the next 25 years.

The PDC did a wonderful job inspiring me - but it also left a bug in my ear. The first day, our instructor Andrew Faust, punctured through my idealism in one obvious comment. It was along the lines of, “You know, people want to run away and create their little paradise, which is great. But what happens when your well is poisoned from the leachate from the municipal landfill, your air quality is so poor you can’t leave the house some days [which happens to those close to Concentrated Animal Feeding Organizations - aka factory farming, the EPA did a study on it], your weather is so weird that you can no longer plant the crops of your grandparents [see Tabasco], and your animals are stressed from the heat and stop producing enough milk to feed you.”

Duh!

So there it is - the balancing act of life. I am you and you are me and we are all in this together. The choices rest in the Doing.

Here is the post on Real Time Farms

Farm Beginnings: Bacchanalian Burn Bonanza

Join us for a Bacchanalian Burn Bonanza!

Bacchus is not a controllable god (as you may remember from your Euripides in school) - and neither, it turns out, is fire. My lesson from burning a pile of wood 25 feet wide and 15 feet tall is this - don’t have any guests nearby but do have an excavator.

Don’t have any guests nearby because it is hard enough to watch the large fire catch the grass on fire without having witnesses join you in trepidation. Also, it felt better to have a smaller more sober crowd for when the fire marshall showed up to make sure we had everything under control. It is only because of the excavator that we were anywhere near under control.

The excavator is necessary because as the grass scorches along the ground outward from the fire, the excavator can dig a moat around the area. Helpless, I watched sparks fly into the tall grass. The excavator quickly would rotate on the treads, tamp those out with the bucket, and turn back quickly towards the the line of fire. “Behind you!,” I wanted to shout, “the grass is burning towards the tall grass behind you and on the left, and on the right and did you see it on the other side? The other side is moving fast and...”

and then it was over.

45 minutes after the flames were reaching 30-40 feet into the air, the intense heat pulled the dry wood down upon itself and the focal point of our Bacchanalian Burn Bonanza celebration turned into Mordor.

But I am learning that even Mordor can be put to good use, our neighbors with the horse farm will take the ash and spread it on their pastures for the potash and the lime.

Cheering to sharing with neighbors.

(Here is a video of the fire starting, a haybale was drenched in diesel fuel and lit on fire...)

Farm Beginnings is the chronicle of a city girl starting to farm. Last installment Corinna spoke of growing what the deer won’t eat. Today she gives an update on the land.

Upset about Fracking? Get excited about Biogas!

I woke up this morning excited, nay wiggly with excitement, because I want to learn all about Biogas generators and put one on our land. I don't know if it is legal to do so in my county (probably not, considering that you are not allowed to put in a composting toilet in your house), in which case I am excited to get that ball moving.

Once I have put one on the land, I think our town needs a big one for our waste - we currently have a beaver problem near the landfill flooding the land, which might be a good segway to focus the community's attention.

Biogas is what happens when anaerobic bacteria eat organic waste, manure (from humans, etc) or biomatter (plants), and give off gas as a byproduct. For countries who don't have quite such a generous excess of land to throw landfills onto they are already utilizing biogas technology: UK, Germany, China, etc. There are a few instances of biogas in the US, however, Wikipedia seems to conflate biogas with Landfill gas, which is incorrect.

My first desk job was working with landfill gas - the ability to take the methane generated by the bacteria and turn it into electricity and put into an industrial boiler. However, due to airborne siloxanes (a type of plastic) from the breakdown of certain beauty products (often in deodorants) the plastic would gunk up the moving parts of the turbines as the gas was heated in the generators. Biogas is a clean gas, no plastics from industrial waste are coming out of your chickens. (at least, we hope not)

We learned in our Permaculture Design Course this weekend that 2 cows, OR 7 goats, OR 170 chickens (and not counting humans or other organic waste streams) can generate enough gas to serve the needs of heating/cooking for 3-4 houses (this is in China). Not that our teacher was recommending that everyone run out and get two cows to keep in the shower in manhattan to run their Wolf ranges. But this notion of a decentralized, regionalized power grid is VERY important and one that our country needs to address.

In the next 30 years nearly 50% of our high power transmission lines will need to be replaced on the east coast and 13%-30% of the power is lost as it travels (that's the buzzing you hear near the wires). One of the principles of permaculture is that pollution is just waste that hasn't been put to better use.

(On a side note, landfills will 100% become super fund sites EVERY TIME because the liner only lasts 30 years and we are mixing industrial waste with organic matter which creates toxic leachate that goes into our groundwater, among many other fun/sad/horrible things. Check your well water if you live near a landfill and tell your neighbors.)

What does this have to do with food? Well, organic waste from the farm in whatever form: corn stalks, human feces, sheep manure, tomato vines, squash leaves, etc all have to go somewhere. You can compost the waste and feed the organic gold back onto your land and watch the pile steam in the winter from these bacteria - or, I would posit AND, you can harness the energy that is coming from the steaming pile and heat your house or run your stove or even your tractor with the biogas. To me, biogas is common sense - the bacteria are doing all of the work!

Upset about fracking? Get excited about Biogas!

It all brings us back to the old adage, "Waste not, want not."

I wanted to write this out because I felt so wiggly that I was having a hard time focussing on my morning meditation. Still feeling wiggly with possibility and promise of the world and ideas and things happening, but I will try again to focus on my mantra!

As Abraham Hicks would say, I am feeling "tuned in tapped on!" ie, the power of the Universe is coursing through my beingness! What a wonderful wonderful thing!!

I wish the same for you today!

Farm Beginnings: Boxwood; Loving What the Deer Don’t

Farm Beginnings is the chronicle of a city girl starting to farm. Last installment Corinna spoke to why she farms. Today she speaks of farming with deer and boxwoods.

Farming with deer might bring visions of Bambi and all of his cousins running around a field prior to harvest into delicious venison steaks. That is not what I am talking about. No, farming with deer is growing goodies I want to eat/enjoy without having the deer demolish them first.

I have a very complicated relationship with deer. I love to watch them run and jump and whisk their tales and yes, I have seen Bambi. Yet I feel the anthropomorphization of the deer population by Disney has adversely affected the biodiversity of our forests. I also like eating them - they are a good source of protein (free range anyone?) and delicious.

Part of planning where to plant goodies on the land involves protecting them from the deer. Deer like to eat most everything in the garden I want to eat and certainly many of the ornamental plants that I would like to smell and look at.

My first step is to plant boxwoods, a trick I learned from Toby Hemenway's book, Gaia’s Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture. Deer don’t like boxwoods. According to a recent NY Times article, “boxwood contains alkaloids that are toxic to deer.” (and a small side note for me to thank them for such a great title). I plan to use boxwood as a fence.

Boxwoods appeal to me for several reasons. They are evergreen, we are renting in an apartment that has many full grown specimens of the slow-growing plant, and I was curious to try propagating from cuttings. I know I am going to be needing a lot of them to make a shield of any utility and the idea of purchasing 50 plants at 20 dollars each was not exciting.

I read recently a book that described a woman who started her arboretum, now filled with 70 foot trees, from seed. “It was cheaper, and she was quite frugal, which is considered sustainable today. She would trade seeds. As she said, plants people share; antiques people don’t share.”

Inspired to be frugal, I purchased Dip N’Grow, and following the directions snuck out very early 2 months ago to barely prune the boxwoods around my apartment. I dipped them into the solution and popped them into the earth. As I lifted the small cuttings from the soil this morning, I did not see any indication of root growth - but Martha Stewart says that it can take up to 3 months.

Besides, it is more fun to sneak out in the early morning before my neighbors are up to take cuttings than to contemplate the cost of a deer fence.

Here is the article on Real Time Farms.