composting methods and why i do what i do

i'd heard things too, but i've never met him nor have i seen his farm, so i can only go by his writings.

there are a ton of others doing interesting things with pastures and restoring lands. i read anything i can find. :)
 
I mean both hotbed and coldframe. It's like any other project, LOTS of prep for the payoff. BOTH my neighbor with his fireplace AND my other neighbor are offering me bricks. I will take ALL that they want to give me, and I can pick them up.
A proper hotbed/coldframe should be a 2 1/2 ft deep trench that must be lined with insulation material. The best material is brick, but it takes a LOT of brick to make it work. I have the spot, I HAVE double dug raised beds before, and this gives me a whole year to fix the bed, buy and cut the lumber and fix the windows before the 2018/2019 winter. You fill it with fresh manure/straw, cover with soil and plant, or transplant into it. As Spring approaches you can put out the cold weather crops and put IN the warm weather crops, started inside the house.
I need to plan this well to accommodate different size windows. I have saved windows from a building that was torn down, from the farm and stored from before I bought the property, and others. I figure that I can use wooden pieces as filler bc during the winter there are fewer lightcandles. Therefore, only cold weather crops will grow from the heat and minimal light, like growing under tunnels inside of a larger tunnel. After the vernal equinox the sun is more direct and can refract and reflect better and grow tomatoes and peppers when it's too cold for them yet outside. Probably I will paint the wood inside white, maybe some mirrors?!? Dunno yet, but I have a small obsession over this. I cannot buy/use a greenhouse on my property. The straight line winds that we often get would destroy a greenhouse, so THIS would be MY small greenhouse.
I have plenty of storage if I want to remove and store the windows during the summer. Maybe I will cover the beds with cardboard and keep any weed seeds or straw seeds from sprouting. Speaking of cardboard, I will probably lay cardboard down under and on the sides of the bricks to keep any weeds from playing in my bed.
I am REALLY EXCITED OVER THIS!!!!! :weee:weee:weee:weee
 
we also never turn down free bricks. last year we hauled about 30 truckloads from a guy who was going out of business and needed his place cleaned up. we had just finished hauling when the city put a notice on the door saying the place was going to be auctioned for back taxes. i really wanted to wait until cooler weather in the fall to do all that hauling, but it worked out that time that we did it when we did. you can see a lot of the bricks/pavers in:

p7110002_Brick_Edge_thm.jpg


and a series of pics on this page (about 2/3rds down):

http://www.anthive.com/project/tasks/

wish we'd had a bigger truck, some things we couldn't get... there was a chunk of iron about 600lbs worth flat plate. would have been useful for something... :)

we love to take natural materials of all kinds (metal, glass, stone, wood). i hate plastic. *ptui*

some day i need to take pics of the glass garden and rust garden.
 
You guys are very lucky to get free bricks. Nothing where I am is free, I have a lot of trim made from bricks on my house. The idea is to do all flower beds in brick to match house. The home improvement stores here sell dyed cement as bricks. I wanted old clay and not only had to buy but pay for delivery
 
When Dad retired, he put together a too-large compost bin using concrete blocks. His garden was only about 3 times the size of his bin! I think he anticipated moving horse manure in because he was working elsewhere, building corals and owned a horse in those days. Mom would not have been too-happy about a big manure pile with a tiny garden. Maybe he was using the bin size as motivation for building a larger garden. I was duty-bound to help ;).

The presence of the bin inspired a pile-it and leave-it approach. We divided it in half and would leave one-half for 18 months. The 2nd pile was layered with some attention to nutrient balance and for holding moisture. There was very little material that wasn't in a good state of decomposition after 18 months.

Trained in having Gardens On Other People's Property (GOOPP ;)), I continued. However, I didn't feel comfortable building bins out of blocks elsewhere! I went underground ...

Digging out about 8" of rocky soil gives me material for capping a fairly large, deep pile in a 4' wide garden bed. Building the compost pile can be obscured by the presence of bushes in one garden and just by distance from the garden parameter in another. After several months, I have enough material to cap it with soil. I try not to leave something that looks like a gravesite through the winter ;).

By the following spring, the material is in no way "composted." However, I have found these beds suitable for squash in the vegetable garden and sunflowers, elsewhere. After a growing season and a second winter, that bed is just fertile ground for most anything.

Using a semi-subterranean approach really helps in this semi-arid location. I can tell you how it led me into truly "stealth composting" at another time but you would have to promise not to tell my neighbors.

;) Steve
 
@ducks4you, i would love a greenhouse, but same issue with very high winds at times and also just the fact that it would cost way too much to keep it warm, especially in the mid-winter when we can have weeks of cloudy weather.

i often daydream about building a house on a hydraulic lift system so that we could go up and down for protection from the wind and cold in the winter, but then we'd miss out on the views...

@Nyboy, bricks can be hard to match. we're pretty much hodge-podge here when it comes down to decorations, but when i do a project i try to make sure there are extras off the side in reserve just in case later i need a fixup or addition... we could have had some very large tubes, slabs of rock and a few more pallets of bricks if we'd had a larger truck. as it was we spent a lot of time on the road going back and forth because the truck was only a half ton load at a time. we've hauled all sorts of things in the cars. Mom used to dumpster dive the marble countertop installer places for goodies... never know what she might come home with. brand new car, trunk full of rocks... :)

plastic has it's uses, but it just falls apart after a few years when exposed to our sun/weather. even a lot of the metal lawn ornaments and wind-chimes don't last too long around here. some are held together by spray paint and wishes. inside the house my main use of plastic is the bean collections in old yogurt containers and sample cups. most recycled from first use so they at least are not wasted before they get sent off to the 2nd recycler. i never microwave anything in plastic and don't like storing food in plastic if i can help it...
 
@Collector we have a few weed piles for the hard cases of weeds that can't be immediately buried (so they can dry out in the sun before they break down). i don't usually need to put much of anything on there (sow-thistle and other thistle roots, milkweed roots, horsetail roots and a few really tough grasses are the main problem children around here). i'm pretty happy to bury everything else. if i'm worried some of it might try to come up again i'll put some cardboard or newpaper layers over it - buried down deep enough not much comes back up.

the clay here needs as much organic material as i can possibly grow/chop and layer on top of it (after it warms up in the spring). the worms are doing so much better when they have places to hide down deeper when it gets hot and dry. i can't water this entire property during the dry spells.

my most common form of weeding is a strap hoe which goes quick over the surface and anything that gets chopped off is left in the sun to dry/rot right where it grew. i think it is important to return as much organic materials grown to the spot where they grew so that veggies/worms will get the most benefit from my efforts. Mom will pick up every little scrap and take it away... :( another reason why i dig holes and bury stuff, it keeps her happy to see bare dirt... i want to do cover crops over the winter but so far we've not worked out a compromise that she can accept. so i have to work around her on this as much as i can. bury, bury, bury... :)
 
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