June 2018 – ONE HUBCAP FARM

Posted on June 25, 2018November 17, 2018 by Mary Ann

Battling the clay and chicken-moving day

Our belongings are at the new house and we are still unpacking. I knew moving with three children was going to be difficult, but I didn’t realize how long the unpacking would take. We have too much stuff, even with all my decluttering efforts.

For the past couple of weeks, my chickens lived at my old house protected by electric netting. My new home is close enough to the old one for me to check on the chickens. Last week, a local towing company moved my chicken house.

You can get a nice view of some of the clay soil. This soil is actually not as bad here as the soil up closer to the house. I will need plenty of help from the chickens to fertilize and aerate this soil. I have had the landscaper working on my yard till in granite dust leftover from the well drilling, lime, cottonseed meal, and several loads of horse manure. I also saved chicken manure, in empty feed sacks, when I cleaned out the chicken house at my old home for months before our move and had it tilled in as well. The garden soil will be okay without anymore extreme effort from me aside from planting cover crops.

I chose the longest day of the year, the summer solstice, to move the chickens. I was late picking up my daughter from youth group because it was still just a bit too light outside that evening for the chickens to be in their nightly chicken-coma. I caught these last two in a flurry of feathers and stuffed them into this metal bucket. They were content in there and, most importantly, could not fly out. I transported them inside my SUV and let them sleep in my garage for the night.

At the front of the house, the soil is terrible. Loads of bricks, lumber, and machinery sat in front of the house for months. When rain falls, it puddles in front of the house in a mud slick on top of the hardpan. I purchased a pickaxe to tackle this soil. The man doing the landscaping found that his tractor’s tiller bounced off the clay, and they even had trouble getting an auger to go into the soil, but a pickaxe will go through. I have given up my morning efforts on the elliptical trainer to spend time using the pickaxe. It is definitely good for building muscles in my arms and back!

A pickaxe will go through the mud and the hardpan, and I have managed to break up the soil and to sprinkle in plenty of gypsum, a clay softener. I have also added lime, copious amounts of horse and chicken manure, and some topsoil. This area, on either side of the front walk, will be my flower garden. I have downsized my gardening efforts from those at my old home, and I hope to spend more concentrated effort on a few plants instead of having a mass of things that easily fall out of control. I am building a sort of raised bed over this area, and I purchased some red worms and some night crawlers from the hardware store to inoculate the soil with worms. The cover of soil and manure softens the clay and prevents it from turning into mud during the rain.

I’ll keep you updated on my gardening progress. I miss working in the garden and I hope to get a fall vegetable garden planted.

Posted on June 7, 2018June 5, 2018 by Mary Ann

My garlic supply for the year is safe

Garlic harvest of main crop. Mostly ‘Music’ garlic.

This garlic harvest is unique. It is the last garlic harvest from my old garden. Planting it was my first gardening effort during my recovery from a serious accident. My aunt dug the rows for me, and my mother helped me plant the cloves. Both of them told me I needed to be resting instead of planting garlic, but since I have helped them with crazy projects, they understood my need to get this garlic in the ground before it was too late. We got the garlic in the ground in late October or early November.

I ordered the original garlic from Peaceful Valley Farm Supply back in the fall of 2016. I grew out that garlic during the fall and winter of 2016-2017, and enjoyed an abundant harvest. As much as it pained me, I saved back the biggest, sturdiest, and healthiest bulbs for seed garlic, and we ate the rest. I even sold a few bulbs, and I gave some as gifts. I stored the bulbs in the cupboard and away from moisture and daylight.

During my recovery from my illness, I broke apart the bulbs into individual cloves. Then I soaked them in an aromatic mixture of fish emulsion and the cheapest vodka available. The fish emulsion gives them a boost of nutrients and the vodka kills bacteria and fungi. People use baking soda, rubbing alcohol, peroxide, and other things to achieve similar results. This blog post describes some other methods of soaking them.

I marked off the rows, about 8 inches apart and four inches deep, and after my aunt dug them I sprinkled rotten chicken litter in the rows. I put the cloves into the ground pointy side up, and covered them with soil. I did not mulch them, and I battled weeds all winter. I recommend mulching them with straw or leaves.

In June, as the leaves began to turn brown, I harvested the garlic. In my early garlic-growing years I have waited until the leaves turned entirely brown to harvest them, but by then the garlic bulb had begun to break apart. Hardneck garlic, which is what I plant because I find that it is easier to cook with the larger individual cloves of hardneck garlic than the smaller ones of softneck garlic. This is a short explanation of the difference between the two.

I also grew some elephant garlic. I got it in a sampler pack from Peaceful Valley. I don’t really like it because it’s not as pungent as ordinary garlic so I have to put more minced garlic in a dish to get the same flavor. I love it roasted on homemade bread, though. It has a much larger root system than ordinary garlic and so I will need a chisel, I think, to get the roots to let go of the clay.

To cure the garlic, I am giving it daily sunbathing time on dry days. It rests inside the shed at night and on rainy days. When the green leaves become brown and crunchy, I will remove them and store the garlic in my pantry for the winter.

Posted on June 4, 2018 by Mary Ann

My first gardening act at the new place!

As I mentioned before, we exposed (and moved) a lot of dirt when we cleared the land for the house. The required septic field is quite large, and we needed room for the children to play, for my chickens, for my garden, and for the pool (my husband said we had to get a pool if we moved, and we went ahead and did it at construction time).

To keep the pool level the nice man with the bulldozer, who thinks I am slightly insane with all the land-clearing we have done, had to move around some soil. When they installed the pool, the other men dug a 10 foot by 10 foot by 4 foot deep hole to get more soil. We needed to fill in the lovely muddy mosquito breeding ground that had filled with water after the rain with dirt, and we also needed to move more dirt up under the pool decking.

We had to buy some dirt to help with this project, and instead of buying clay soil, we had him steal some more clay from the area to put beside the pool decking, and purchased some topsoil to put on my garden spot.

The topsoil was of pretty low quality, as I expected it would be, but it’s better than the clay. It also has bits of broken glass and plenty of weed seeds, I have discovered. I saw an ominous sheen of green from the house and went down to investigate.

It’s interesting that the native clay soil doesn’t seem to have many weed seeds sprouting. I guess the soil has been covered with trees for many years and the weed seed bank has diminished. The original hardwood forest was clear-cut about 20 years before we purchased the land, judging by the size of the pine trees that had come to repopulate the forest. My estimation is that the surrounding forest has been in hardwoods for 100 years or more, according to the size of the trees.

This is good for my gardening plans. The weeds are terrible in my previous garden due to years of hay mulch application and weed seeds that I allowed to blow in from the surrounding area. I have learned my lessons the hard way, and I will be managing the weeds intensively when they are tiny and not allowing them to go to seed.

I purchased some 6 mil black plastic from the home store and covered the young weeds, which are mostly crabgrass, with the plastic.

A construction site is a great source of debris with which I can hold down the edges of the plastic. I covered about 500 square feet with the plastic, and I’ll move it in a few days to cover another area.