What do you do when you are trying to grow all your own food and it drops to 18 degrees in mid-April? Well, we suddenly had about 500 houseplants here at Dancing Rabbit as all of our seedlings are now spread out over our dining room table.
Early in March we ordered our seeds (organic and open pollinated of course) and started planting our first Missouri garden at DR. With much advice from Sandhill, as well as some of their compost, we started things off with a big round of brassicas (cabbage, broccoli, kale, cauliflower, and choy sum), lettuce, and spinach. When you are trying to grow everything for at least 7 adults you are talking about 50 each of the brassicas and probably 100 lettuces and spinach. They started off nice and small where they all fit in just two flats, but once we transplanted them to 2 inches apart we ended up with a lot of flats!
Where to put all these seedlings in a place they can get enough sun and stay warm in this early spring? Unfortunately, our trailer has only one good south facing window and the roof overhang is so much that the sun only comes in a few inches. I first built a nice wooden cold frame made entirely of slab-wood (waste from the mill) and a dumpster-dived window. Soon that was overflowing, too. That was when the school bus became a giant coldframe. Parked east/west, the bus has a whole row of south facing windows. Once we added two 55 gallon drums of water for thermal mass, it has done an excellent job of holding a good temperature for the seedlings; passive solar at work. We also got ourselves a few strawbales and some glass, and we had another instant coldframe. Amazing that on a sunny day when the temperature is 30 outside, the coldframes easily get up to 90 and we have to open them so they don't get too hot. Basically its like a low temperature solar cooker, but we'll talk about cooking next issue, once we have some vegetables.
Even with all these great passive solar mini-greenhouses, since the temperature went down to 18 degrees, I decided to ease my mind and just bring the little guys inside where they can stay safe and warm. However, when the weather breaks next week it will probably be time to transplant out to the garden and hope we don't get another deep frost (if we do we can still save stuff with glass jars and mulch and maybe some Remay cloth but that would be quite a scramble). Of course, that's just the beginning since the tomatoes and peppers are already up in flats and will need transplanting to other flats soon as well.
I started this story with the seedlings but maybe I should have started with the soil. Our rental home has a nice big garden plot just outside that's been used for years as a garden (before that was a chicken yard and hog pen). The soil is very high in clay so it holds moisture well or, put another way, it has poor drainage. Following the local customs, we had the landlord's farmhand, Curvin, disc the garden with the tractor. With just a few swipes the tractor cleared the weeds, turned them under, and loosened the dirt. Instant garden... we thought.
Upon closer inspection, it became clear that a discer really only loosens the top 4 inches of the soil. Even there it left big clods since things were still a little wet. Now, most of us Rabbits cut our gardening teeth with the John Jeavons double digging method, which loosens soil 24 inches down, so we weren't too thrilled about 4 inches. We took to it with shovel and fork and started making beds the way we knew how. We don't expect to double dig the whole thing this first year but we do hope that we can at least loosen it with the fork 12 inches down and double dig some of it. We are excited to see if there is a difference in yield or quality from areas dug deep and those just disced. Digging by hand can be hard work and we will see if that's how we go or not. Sure makes me want to experiment with the Natural Farming techniques of Masanobu Fukuoka who proposes not digging at all in his book One Straw Revolution. Eventually we'll try it all, I'm sure.
So by the time you see this we should have all our spring season crops in: carrots, beets, peas, fava beans, basil, potatoes, onion sets, etc. We may even be enjoying our first salad from the lettuce and spinach that just sprouted a few weeks ago. I can't wait. You're all invited to come by for a garden fresh dinner any time and, of course, to help weed the garden.
Intentional Community Bookstore