Spring waits for nobody

Spring waits for nobody. Now that May has almost arrived, everything is coming back to life. Here in south-central Wisconsin, we are apparently about 2 weeks ahead of schedule in terms of temperature. I have heard that people are already putting their tomatoes out. This sounds a little risky.

This past week I took off 3 days for a working vacation, to put in some hard time in the garden and in the dome. Spring waits for nobody, so there is no time like the present.

Priority one was to get the dome finished. I finished applying mortar to the interior walls. What was next was to finish up the garden beds, which Katie and I designed. In the foreground are two partially buried pots that contain grape vines. Above are to lines that the vines will grow on (hopefully!).

Here is a shot from above, me standing on the foundation wall. You can see the star pattern of the beds with narrow paths. We decided to not put a bed on the right (north-east) and to use that spot as a work area and a place to grow grapes. I spent Friday afternoon after a long night of playing music with Not On Mars shoveling wood chips that we're freely available at the Mount Horeb municipal compost site and bringing them home for use on the dome floor. Looks nice, doesn't it? I've moved several yards of some fiine A'mer'kin horse manure and chicken-poop compost into these beds, with several more yards to go. Should grow some fine veggies with this mix.

Aiden has been very helpful, too, helping Dad cut and drill boards for raised beds. Oo! Looks like he left his tools out! :)

On the inside post for the grape lines, I put hooks which are now holding potted strawberries. Pretty soon I will put up 2 or 3 of these outside to hang the strawberries, as the dome will be too warm for them. This post will end up having four different heirloom variety tomato plants, mostly smaller varieties, which will cascade down around the post. I can't wait to see (and taste!) this when it's flourishing. :)


Here is another shot of the grape line and hanging post.

It's time to get our young plants in the ground. Katie was thinking of having the tomatoes run the outer perimeter of the beds. Tomatoes in the back, then herbs and other goodies in the front.

Strawberries are getting some flowers on them. I bought these bare-root. I'm going to try and winter them in a buried box this winter.

Spring is in the air!

Nothing like knowing that Spring has sprung, that we turn the tide now against the hard winter and smile in anticipation of the coming growth. It's intoxicating!

We have been very busy throughout most of the winter. And now that Spring is shifting from 1st, to 2nd and soon into 3rd gear, there is a sense of urgency to get everything going. Lots to do is an understatement.

Katie and I finally settled on a design for the beds on the inside of the dome greenhouse. Ergonomically and mathmatically, the number is 6: There will be 6 beds separated by 6 walkways. There will be ample space for hanging as well, which will be pretty cool (and delicious!). Eventually, we will have grape and hops that will be trained up archways that are partially suspended from the interior of the dome. Tres cool.


Another shot of the beds so far. I still have a good deal of mortar/plaster work to tend to. As I complete wall space, I will follow with raised beds and fill from our local horse stables.


These guys are being transplanted outside. This is everything (minus a few that already made it outside) that survived the winter. One of our experiments was to put these plants through a cold winter outside just to see who would make it. I may have explained this in a previous entry, but what I did was dig a big hole where the cold frame would go and fill it with horse manure and other compost-able material to supply warmth to the root zones of the plants in the cold frame in the dead of winter. The result? A lot of kale, spinach, chard and onions made it!


These are itching to get into new beds. Here we have a few lettuce varieties, cauliflower (not personally fond of it), tomatoes and some other things. These last few days we are looking at frost in the night time - and now that I have disassembled the cold frames, we will be bringing a good deal of these inside for the evening - at least for a few days until the sudden sub-freezing goes away again.


Downstairs, there are still 2 trays of herbs that are waiting to make their way into new, comfy raised beds in the dome. I am thinking that most of the herbs will do really well in the dome, where the warmth will be constant and high as we move into summer. Our strawberries will eventually have to be moved outside. Kale, spinach and chard as well.


Things are progressing nicely. Next up I will show you the new fruit and nut trees and the other goodies we are putting in as the time comes.

Getting ready for Spring, extraordinary weather conditions

A few moons have passed since the last time I posted. Largely this is due in part to the fact that there hasn't been a whole lot going on. It's winter and things have mostly shut down. I am happy to report that we did harvest some kale from the cold frames about 3 weeks ago or so. Katie made 2 big batches of some ridiculously delicious bean soup with it. There is still kale, spinach and swiss chard out there, too! We lost a good deal of spinach, though. :( Not sure how well the radishes are doing, although there is still green above the ground.

So, this weekend I will begin planting seeds to get ready for the Spring green house season. There has been plenty of discussion of what to plant, how to arrange the green house, etc. For starters, we will be planting heirloom varieties exclusively.

Here is one of the infamous 'Garden In A Can' cans. It is loaded with many many many different kinds of seeds, many many many of each kind. We plan to collect seeds each year to store and use the following year, so planting heirlooms is the most reliable way to go.

Check out their website: http://everlastingseeds.com/


We are chicken psychologists. It is a growing field. The chickens we're unhappy. We deduced finally that they had cabin fever. Jason was thus sent out to make a place for chickens to get out and exercise. These chickens we're picky about the snow, so Jason spread out hay for them to walk on. Now everybody is happy, no fighting, and we have happy chicken eggs as a result.


The weather outside has been frightful. And fascinating! Sometimes, very beautiful. Check this out: we had a couple of days that we're very foggy, which was preceded by a significant melt. The air was literally saturated with moisture - no more moisture could be dissolved into the air. As this condition was setup, the average temperature was settling just under the freezing mark. The product of these perfect physical conditions? Ice crystals! Everywhere! And they we're HUGE!

This happened over an evening. The chicken wire is carpeted with a complex network of crystals.


Here is a close up. You can click the photo to get the bigger version.


That's it for now. Hopefully in the next couple of weeks I'll have some good news about tender young seedlings whose progress we will be tracking. We are also considering experimenting with aquaponics on a small scale so as to (get ready for bad pun) "test the waters" ! =) BWAHAHA!

Aquaponics video: http://tinyurl.com/y8g32gr

Aquaponics search: http://tinyurl.com/ydvot52

Breakfast for Dinner! Snow Day, December 8th, 2009

Need I say more?

Oh, alright then.  Homemade whole wheat blended banana-outmeal pancakes, with brown sugar,  ginger, cinnamin and cardomom - fried potatoes with onion and garlic - and sour dough slices with homemade gravy.  Those hot sauces go great on the potatoes!  This is day 2 of me cooking dinner.  Last night was indian: chicken curry and bhindi masala!  Sorry .. no pics ..

December 9th, 2009 - SNOW DAY! =)

Nothing like a snow day!  When I was a little boy, it was about the best thing ever.  Now as an adult, it's still about the best thing ever!  Oot where we live, it's very serene when it's a snow day, after a blizzard.  Virtually nobody on the road, save those 'jobbers' with their 4 wheel drive plow truck on their way to or from work.

For me, it's the start of the big test.  Proof that this grand experiment is worth the sweat that I and my friends and family gave to get this green house up and running. 

Here is the garden dome with a cap of snow on top from the recent blizzard.

Inside the dome, the temperature is pretty OK.  You can see the snow load on top.  One of the reasons I implemented a geodesic dome was because of it's natural structural stabilty.  Several hundred pounds of load are evenly distributed amongs the struts and vertices.

... and the temperature is quite nice!  Not very sunny today, so the boxes didn't get to heat up too much.  But it's a nice temperature for kale and swiss chard.  :)

Panarama of the inside of the garden dome.  There is some 'bending' which is an artifact of the panarama function of the camera.

... aaand a panarama of the front, after having spent 2.5 hours snow blowing and shoveling!

And lastly, a play, choreographed by my beautiful daughter, Lillian.  

Saturday, Dec 6 - 2009

It is starting to get cold up here.  And, although my understanding is that chickens are pretty hearty little creatures who are pretty cold tolerant, it's in our interest to do as much as we can to hedge against the wickedly cold days that will soon come upon us.  So, we had to seal up the chicken coop as best as possible in advance of those very cold days ahead.

The sides of the chicken coop that were once open have now been filled with hay and boarded up.  The sides that were against the interior wall of the garage have just been packed with hay.  This will create a good air pocket to insulate and give the chicken a nice, cozy place to live when the weather gets bad.

Jason, up on top of the chicken coop, securing mylar backed foam sheets to the top of the coop.

Dec 5th, 2009 - first snow, finishing up outside

Well, the first snow of the season arrived a few days ago, depositing a few inches of the white stuff all over Dane County. This spells the end of the majority of my outside work, the remainder being put off until it gets warm. There is still a good deal of work on the dome greenhouse that must be done, but it will have to wait.

However, we did get pretty far on the project. We've got a good deal of the moisture abatement underway; the rest can wait until Spring. I finally got a door on the dome. At the very least, I can plug some of the crack where drafts infiltrate into the warmer interior.

In the last few weeks I got more mesh on the outside of the tire foundation and dug a big trench along the outside perimeter, where we will lay gravel and drain tile and apply plaster to the mesh to repel water.


Saturday morning, just before 10am.


57 deg in the dome, a whopping 72 in the covered beds!!


Everybody inside seems to be doing quite well! You can even see condensation droplets on the inside of the window frames.

When we finally harvest, I will post Katie's recipe for Goddess Kale Chips. They are incredible!


Winter chickens.


Here is a cool shot of our house from across the ridge. That's us waaaay down there!