What did you do in the garden today?

[Smokerbill]

Quick update on my compost sifting and setting up my new pallet wood raised bed I mentioned a few days ago. Again, this updated post was initially uploaded to the thread Show Me Your Pallet Projects! as it relates to my newly designed pallet wood raised beds. But I also want to share it here on the gardening thread because of the overlap...

Update on setting up my new pallet wood raised bed...

Last time I had finished the pallet wood 4X4 foot,16 inch high, raised bed with my new design. Using the hügelkultur method, I lined the bottom of the raised bed with logs...

Then I added a load of aged wood chips to fill in the gaps between the logs, and to fill the raised bed up to a level where I had about 6-8 inches remaining...

Today, I was working on making the final chicken run compost and topsoil 1:1 mix to fill that top 6-8 inches in the raised bed.

Last year I shifted my chicken run compost, dumped it into a garden cart, then mixed in the topsoil. This year I got a little smarter so I thought I would share my improved setup. So, first a picture of the setup...

On the left side of the picture, you can see the load of topsoil I bought at the nursery yesterday. It is high quality Red River Topsoil and that load cost me $60.00. On the right, you can see a load of my chicken run compost in the big Gorilla cart, then the wire cart is for rejects from sifting, then underneath the cement mixer compost sifter is my 6 cubic foot Gorilla cart that catches the sifted compost.

As you will notice, everything is setup up next to the chicken run in my backyard.

Anyways, the brilliant idea I got this year was to sift the compost and the topsoil at the same time, eliminating all the work of having to measure and mix the compost and topsoil 1:1 later in a cart. So, I would take 2 shovel scoops of topsoil, toss it into the compost sifter, and then take 2 scoops of chicken run compost and toss that into the sifter, repeat until the Gorilla cart under the sifting barrel was full. Everything came out sifted and premixed into that Gorilla cart under the sifting barrel. Beautiful! Saved a lot of work over last year where each step was done by itself.

Old dogs can learn new tricks! For those of you who think that solution was a no brainer, just let me celebrate my modest moment in improving my process efficiency.

Here is a picture of the new pallet wood raised bed completely set up and ready to plant. Our planting date is not until 29 May, but I'm ready to go this year!

If all goes well, I plan on building another one of these new designed pallet wood raised beds before the end of the month. If things go really well, I will build a total of 4 new raised beds. Can a person have too many raised beds to grow food? I think not.

I saw your other post about how you built the bed, and it's a great design! But I just had a thought about using Hugelkultur in it. Do you think that the heat treated pallet wood walls will decompose pretty fast with all the fungal action going on in the layer of wood at the bottom?

 

[LifeSimpleAndSweet]

Tomato flowers fertilize themselves, so you might not get anything different. I don't worry about cross pollinations with my tomatoes, and saved the seeds of 4 different kinds to plant this year.

Not to say it can't happen. Just not as likely as other plants.

That's helpful. I wondered.
I bought flower bags and a couple of different seed envelopes for saving seed this year.

 

[LifeSimpleAndSweet]

All of the above We cook them in bacon grease or butter and salads.

I just picked some yesterday, rinsed it in the hose, chopped it up, and sauteed it really quickly in butter. It was good!

 

[LifeSimpleAndSweet]

Garden updates:

Installed some new solar lights neat each garden gate and at the end of each pathway - 8 lights in total and could use 1 more. These were a special buy on Menards' website last week and got delivered today.

More gravel is down, making the two major pathways done. No more muddy shoes from going to the greenhouse!

Pics:
View attachment 3509225View attachment 3509226View attachment 3509227View attachment 3509228View attachment 3509229

ETA: The boards you see laying on the gravel are temporary to make wheeling the wheelbarrow through easier.

I love what you are doing. What are the responses from your neighbors?

 

[BReeder!]

I love what you are doing. What are the responses from your neighbors?

I would say they responsed well.
Since we started this garden 6 years ago, neighbor behind me built 2 or 3 raised beds and in other areas planted grapes (unfortunately failed) and raspberries (a real love/hate relationship though in that one) and then the neighbor next to us expanded his gardening from just a few tomato plants along the fence to a large tilled section at the back of his yard.

 

[Paz]

Anybody who grows chard, when should I harvest? And thoughts on how to prepare it?

Rainbow chard is one of my new plants this year, so it's my first time dealing with it. The plants arev about 8-10 inches tall right now and actually starting to look the the pictures I see online finally. Is this full grown though, or still small? How big do the leaves get? And then there is eating it - how should I prepare it: raw like lettuce, sauteed like spinach, boiled like collards, all of these, none of these?

I pick the outer leaves whenever they reach about 30 centimeters. I then cook them in soups, add them tho rice, fill them with rice, many patties with them, and basically Everything.

 

[gtaus]

I saw your other post about how you built the bed, and it's a great design! But I just had a thought about using Hugelkultur in it. Do you think that the heat treated pallet wood walls will decompose pretty fast with all the fungal action going on in the layer of wood at the bottom?

You know, I don't expect my pallet wood raised beds to last a lifetime. I think using untreated pine wood will normally last 3-5 years in a raised bed. I don't know if using the Hügelkultur system will cause the wood to rot out sooner than that. I have 3 hügelkultur raised beds out in my main garden with untreated wood and they are still intact for over 5 years. I have 2 hügelkultur raised beds in my backyard using pallet wood and they are going on their third summer with no signs of wood rot yet. I live in northern Minnesota, and half our year is under snow, so maybe my untreated raised beds just last longer than a raised bed in a more southern state.

I have thought about staining or sealing the pallet wood on the raised bed prior to filling it up. Another idea was to line the inside with empty "plasticy" feed bags and maybe that would add some life to the build because the barrier would keep the pallet wood separated from the soil.

However, I have just decided to leave everything as is for the pallet wood raised beds and actually see how long it lasts before it needs to be repaired, rebuilt, or replaced. A very big factor for me is knowing that I spent less than $1.00 on the hardware for the raised bed, the pallet wood was free, so I did not want to spend much time, money, or energy on trying to make it last a few years longer. It will be easier, and cheaper, for me to just rebuild if needed.

I liked your question, but I really don't know the real answer yet. Maybe someone else has had experience with this issue and could help us both?

 

[gtaus]

Anybody who grows chard, when should I harvest? And thoughts on how to prepare it?

Rainbow chard is one of my new plants this year, so it's my first time dealing with it. The plants arev about 8-10 inches tall right now and actually starting to look the the pictures I see online finally. Is this full grown though, or still small? How big do the leaves get? And then there is eating it - how should I prepare it: raw like lettuce, sauteed like spinach, boiled like collards, all of these, none of these?

I enjoy eating Swiss Chard at all stages of growth. I start harvesting the outer leaves when they get about 6 inches tall. There are so many ways to eat Swiss Chard, but in our house, Dear Wife makes an Asian soup with the fresh Swiss Chard I pick. I normally don't let my Swiss Chard get over 10 inches tall before I harvest the outer leaves.

I have used raw Swiss Chard in salads, sauteed like spinach, and steamed in a basket over boiling water. It's all good to me. But my favorite way to eat it is in the soup Dear Wife makes.

 

[gtaus]

A few weeks ago I raked up a bunch of leaves and stuff around the chicken run fencing on the outside so I could mow up close to the fence. I tossed that stuff into a big muck bucket and forgot about it until today. I was just going to toss everything into my compost sifter but discovered that the muck bucket was heavier than I thought it would be. That meant it must have been wet from some rain last week and being a plastic muck bucket, it retained all the water from the rains.

Wet compost does not sift well, so I decided to just dump everything into the chicken run. When I turned over the bucket and everything came out, it was full of juicy worms. Boy, did the chickens go crazy!

My question, can I do the same thing, this time on purpose, and see if I can get enough worms growing to start a worm bin? Would the worms in leaf litter be red worms for composting or would they be earth worms? The biggest worms were about 3 inches long and not very fat. Just nice and juicy for the chickens.

 

[Acre4Me]

YES!!!

Last cold night is behind us! The lowest temps in the 10 day forecast are this weekend, so we will finally harden off the starts at night so we can plant them soon!

Next we will lay out black plastic to heat up the soil for sweet potatoes and melons. And string the bean towers so we can plant beans and cucumbers.