Johnny Rotten Appleseed

"Don't accept the old order. Get rid of it." Johnny Rotten

Right before the 10-day bike ride hiatus, when we still had sunny skies and dry ground to work, we got started on planting the fruit trees. We planted seventeen trees in all: four varieties of apple, and two varieties each of peach, plum, cherry, and pear.

We first laid out a line with string and stakes and then measured eight feet between stakes where each tree would be planted. Most of the trees are on dwarf rootstock and only require eight-foot spacing.

The stakes are repurposed PVC leftover from the bed hoops.

The first tree to go in was the pear. Because it is a semi-dwarf and will take up more space. I figured it could overlap the sidewalk thus giving passersby a free nosh on the way home from the bus stop.

One down, sixteen to go.

After the first row was in, we marked off a second row, with stakes staggered to make them offset from the back (most northern) row of trees thus allowing more sunlight through.

T-easer No. 1

T-shirts to the screen printer. Coming soon: two other colors.

Bikenik Returns

In the Adams Morgan neighborhood of Washington DC for lunch after a 5-day, 360-mile bike ride from Pittsburgh. Wasn't sure how this pub got wind of it.

Tune in tomorrow for the return of the Beetnik Urban Farm Blog, and a t-shirt update.

Leaving Pittsburgh, weighing at least five pounds more than I would five days later.

Many a beautiful high trestle along the Great Allegheny Passage.

After more than fifty miles of steady climbing, we crossed the Eastern Divide and had a pleasant twenty-three mile downhill ride into Cumberland, Maryland. 

Two days of riding and 160 miles from downtown Pittsburgh to Cumberland, the last town on the GAP and the start, from our perspective, of the C & O Canal Path.

Many of the 75 locks on the C & O Canal had extant lock houses. Quite Irelandish.

Pretty much 200 miles of this.

We camped on three of our four nights. Our last night, in Harper's Ferry, West Virginia, we opted for a rental cottage, just so we could ride the two vertical miles into the heart of town. Made me want to start a rebellion. That night, the sky opened up and it poured epic Gilgamesh torrents.

Hey, I have a great idea for a transportation system: Dredge a 200-mile long river, right next to an existing river, and tow boats up it's length through a series of seventy-five locks and eleven aqueducts. Encounter a mountain, no worries, just tunnel through it, river and towpath and all, even if it is 3,100 feet through solid granite.

The rains in Harper's Ferry turned the trail into a sloppy squishy mud wrestling quagmire. I washed the mud off several times that day, and the tow path muck plugged up the space between my front tire and fender to the point it popped loose. All in all, a very challenging day.

The work was rewarded by a visit to my bronze idol, Bill Murray.

Blogus Interruptus

I won't be blogging about gardening for the next few days as my friend Pat and I ride from Pittsburgh to Washington, D.C. on the Great Allegheny Passage and the C & O Canal towpath. 

My bike is now a hundred pounds. Does it look fat?

Grid Schlock

About those grids. I thought I'd be smart and use some plastic foam screen trim. I figured it would be waterproof and I liked that it was only 3/4 of an inch wide. What I didn't reckon was that it was as brittle as Dick Cheney's arteries and it warps in the heat. Hopefully I can get a couple of years out of it.

Beetnik Urban Farms T-shirts update: they're on order and an announcement will be made some time soon!

26 8-foot pieces of trim, 14 cut to 47.5 inches.

I drilled them at one-foot intervals, six pieces at a time.

I tied them together with zip ties, the duct tape for the new millennium.

And, voila!

On the Grid

Last Tuesday was time to plant out and start filling in the grid. Each 8'x4' box is divided into a square-foot grid, 32 squares, to be filled in with either plant starts or seeds. With almost ninety heirloom varieties to plant, 128 squares doesn't seem like so much. Must build some more boxes. Next year.

Soon to be announced: Beetnik Urban Farm® T-shirts, in three great colors!

The squares on the north side will be filled with either one tomato or two pole bean plants. I will be adding a netting trellis on the north end of each box, and train the plants to climb the seven feet.

About half the squares were filled with starts, the rest were planted with seed—one per square in the case of cauliflower or cabbage; up to sixteen to a square in the case of radishes or onions. The big spreading squashes and melons were planted along the fence in the background. 

Anticipating last weekend's cold spell, I installed the PVC hoops that will allow me to cover the boxes without smashing the new transplants. Enjoying a challenge, I waited until Saturday's gale force winds before attempting to attach the plastic covers.

Here is a complete list of all we planted this year:

Arugula OG (AKA Rocket or Roquette), Arugula (Apollo), Arugula (Sylvetta 603, AKA Wild Rocket) , Asparagus (Mary Washington), Bean (Climbing French  OG), Bean (Ideal Market OG), Beet (Burpee's Golden OG) , Beet (Chioggia), Beet (Detroit Dark Red) , Broccoli (Calabrese) , Broccoli (Rapini), Brussels Sprouts (Catskill), Brussels Sprouts (Long Island Improved), Cabbage (Copenhagen Market) , Cabbage (Red Express), Carrot (Atomic Red), Carrot (Danvers OG), Cauliflower (Giant of Naples), Caulliflower (Green Macerata), Collards (Georgia Southern) , Collards (Vates) , Cucumber (Japanese Long), Flower ((Prairie) Black-Eyed Susan), Flower ((Prairie) Butterflyweed) , Flower ((Prairie) Purple Coneflower), Flower (Brocade Mix Marigold), Flower (Red Marietta) , Herb (Basil Genovese OG) , Herb (Chives Garlic OG), Herb (Chives OG), Herb (Cilantro OG) , Herb (Florence Fennel OG) , Herb (Flowering Chinese Leek), Herb (Lavender (English) , Herb (Parsley Giant from Italy OG) , Herb (Spearmint), Herb (Summer Savory), Herb (Thyme), Kale (Dwarf Blue Curled OG) , Kale (Lacinato OG) , Leek (Giant Musselburgh), Lettuce (green) (Radicchio Catalogna Puntarelle Dandelion), Lettuce (green) (Chicory (Castelfranco), Lettuce (green) (Radicchio  (Rossa Di Treviso), Lettuce (Amish Deer Tongue) , Lettuce (Chadwick's Rodan), Lettuce (Cimmaron), Lettuce (Ella Kropf OG), Lettuce (Forellenschluss), Lettuce (Gold Rush OG) , Lettuce (Oak Leaf), Lettuce (Outredgeous), Lettuce (Petite Rouge), Melon (Blacktail Mountain Watermelon (OG)), Melon (American Green Fleshed Pineapple), Melon (Collective Farm Woman), Melon (Pride of Wisconsin) , Onion (Bianca di Maggio), Onion (Red of Florence), Onion (Wethersfield Red), Onion (Yellow of Parma), Parsnip (Half Long Guernsey), Pea (Sugar Snap Pea), Pea (Tall Telephone Garden), Radish (Chinese Green Luobo (Qingluobo), Radish (Chinese White Winter), Radish (Early Scarlet Globe) , Shallot (Zebrune), Spinach (Amsterdam Prickly Seeded Spinach), Squash (Black Beauty Zucchini OG) , Squash (Golden Zucchini), Squash (Patisson Panaché (Jaune et Verte OG) , Squash (Patisson Panaché (Vert et Blanc OG) , Squash (Table Queen) , Squash (Waltham Butternut OG) , Swiss Chard (Verde De Taglio), Tomato (Amish Paste), Tomato (Cherokee Purple), Tomato (Green Grape), Tomato (Hssiao His Hung Shih), Tomato (Riesentraube), Tomato (Rosso Sicilian OG) , Tomato (Ukrainian Purple) , Turnip (Purple Top White)  

Got It Covered

Christo and Jeanne-Claude stopped by over the weekend and covered our raised beds. Good thing, too, as the temps dipped into the thirties Saturday night. No worries though; it'll be in the nineties tomorrow thus preserving our May average temperatures and mollifying the nut-burger climate change skeptics.

Tomorrow, visible evidence that we have actually planted something.

Beetnik T-shirt announcement coming soon!

Nice work you crazy people.

Árboles Frutales Enanos

Bought eight dwarf fruit trees on Monday (and apparently some frutos as well). Went back the next day and found they were half off. Got a price adjustment and bought six more. Woo hoo! If they don't work out, we'll toss 'em.

Fruit and fruto, Those of us in the Chinese language community don't even consider Spanish a foreign (or fern, as W might say) language. Too many commonalities and cognates. Who wouldn't know what árboles frutales are?

Rethinking Inside the Box

As the fundy Christian said about the capricious weather as he was getting into his kid filled SUV, “it’s as predicted in the BI-BULL.” Well, I’ll believe that when my raised beds are full of Heaven-sent frogs. Until then, I’m blaming us carbon belching apes for this changeable weather. So, back to Tuesday, when the temps were in the eighties, I figured we had one good day, possible two, to get the beds leveled and filled. So that’s what we did.

Marty making sure we had three-feet between the boxes. 

Leveling the boxes requires skill and patience, both of which I lack. After awhile, I just called it "good."

We are using Mel's recipe for our growing medium. Mel is Mel Bartholomew, the originator of square foot gardening. His recipe calls for 1/3 vermiculite, 1/3 compost, and 1/3 spagnum peat moss. While the Canadian peat moss people claim that they harvest their peat in a sustainable way, a better alternative, if you can find it,  is coir, a byproduct of coconut production. Note: Since we don't yet have compost from our composting operation, we had to purchase that. 

After mixing well, haul the mix over to the box and dump it in. We divided each box in half in terms of the amount of mix to combine as it's just too heavy and unwieldy if done all at once.

Then the bed is leveled out.

Gothic if not epic.

This angle gives a better view of the slope and the "level" boxes.

Thinking Inside the Box (Part Deux)

Since it's currently in the thirties and snowing, with snowflakes as big as really big snowflakes, let me show you what I did on Monday when it was in the eighties.

This is our slightly sloping garden space, roughly thirty-five feet wide, by seventy feet deep. That's my lovely vintage Mazda B2000 long-bed pickup in the background.

The former owner had a small garden in the foreground. Today's task is to rototill about half the space and level it out somewhat before placing and filling the four raised beds on Tuesday. 

I rented this nine-horse Honda rototiller from Des Moines Rental. It was a beast and I just managed to till this in the two-hour rental period.

This next bit put the man in manual labor: scooping and distributing loads of dirt eight cubic yards at a time (sweet Jesus) for about three hours. Slept pretty well Monday night.

Check out the next posting to see all we did Tuesday, another freakishly warm day brought to you by primate-induced climate change.

Thinking Inside the Box

Since we are basically engaging in square-foot gardening, we decided raised beds were a necessity. Square-foot gardening requires controlling the growing medium to the extent that no actual dirt is involved. It also works on a grid system, which  raised beds facilitate nicely. We decided on four 8'x4' boxes this first year. I modified a design from Organic Gardening, and stole one of their photos as well. 

Note 1: except for the addition of the PVC, these boxes were actually constructed last fall. You might notice how they have already started to fade, from their original reddish hue, to their current dish-water blond, on the way to their eventual silver grey. 

Note 2: Before I forget, at least one viewer has complained that this blog doesn't align properly on Internet Explorer; please know that I don't care. Get a Mac.

I used cedar boards (certified sustainable). Each box uses three 8-foot 2x12s and an 8-foot 2x4. Cut one 2x12 in half for the ends. Cut the 2x4 into one 4-foot piece for a center brace. Cut the other 4-foot piece into four 11 1/2-inch pieces for corner supports. Attach these to each end of the 8-foot 2x12s with 2 1/2 inch deck screws. (Photo stolen from Organic Gardening)

Attach each end board using three-inch deck screws. This requires six screws, three into the 4-foot end boards, and three into the attached corner supports.

Check the box for squareness before adding the center brace.

Mark the center of each side board one inch up from the bottom.

Screw two 3-inch screws into each end of the center brace.

Attach three 11-inch pieces of PVC pipe to each side of the box using two 1-inch clamps and 1 1/2-inch deck screws

The final step is to cut three 10-foot pieces of 1/2-inch PVC to 8-foot lengths. These provide the ribs on which to drape a crop cover.