On a Farm, basically the same thing happens every year.  The cool part though is that it has variations as you go, and the end result is always satisfying.  We discovered, in this year’s garden, that the spacing recommendations on the packets don’t always hold true.  With our green beans, this was absolutely the case.  We harvested 2, 4×12 beds of green beans and came away with just as many beans as we had in our old garden spaces with a measured seeder.  These beds were hand sown and way too close together.  BUT!  If you add a huge amount of chicken poop, no amount of crowding seems to matter because there is enough nutrient for all involved.  We harvested several bushels of beans that translated to the 41 quarts plus give aways.  This easily matched the old garden yields. We have enough canned green beans to provide beans as a vegetable once a week for over a year.

If you are striving for self-sufficiency, keep in mind that if you have a large organic garden (ours is a half acre of 40 raised beds), when you harvest your produce, you need to know how to store it.  It is an immense job.  I’ve found that no matter what the vegetable, the canning of it takes a whole day.  My last 14 quarts are in the canner as I write this and it is 6 pm.  I started at 9 this morning…. actually it took 3 days. I’ve been cutting off the ends and chopping them into bite sized pieces for the past two days.  Of course, there are all the other chores that don’t disappear.  My friend Eddie, who owned our local feed store, said that no one seems to understand that everything you add to a farm in order to expand, just compounds all of the care taking involved.  Absolutely true.  You need to take care so as to not grow beyond your ability to handle.  Animals are just like children.  Just because you are canning, doesn’t mean the donkeys don’t need feeding or eggs need collecting.  Know your limits.

Tomorrow, pepper harvesting and cleaning the barn.  We have a prego goat that needs a clean nest.  She’s due in the next few weeks.  Stay tuned.  We are guessing (Hoping for) twins.  She is really turning into Mother Waddles.

After surgery 2 years ago this month, a drought and infestation of grasshoppers last year, a revamping of the raised beds, including hail guards, shade cloth and high pressure water hydrants, the JAZ Farm gardens are performing like they have always been expected to. We adapted and overcame just like farmers have to.  So far we have only had to contend with “normal” gardening annoyances like tomato horn worms (hack, gag, puke!), some grasshopper issues in our cabbages, and – something I never thought I’d say- too much water!  The whole garden is exploding!  Weeds included.  We are going to be manufacturing rope out of the bind weed and see if we can’t find a market for it! LOL.  The baskets shown here are from just one of our bush bean beds.  There is one more ready to be harvested this afternoon so we will be at close to 3 bushels.  We have 2 more that will be ready around the beginning of September.  I guess I’ll be canning tomorrow.  We should be all set on green beans for the coming winter.  Once we pull the bean plants, there will be Cauliflower, more Cabbage, Broccoli and fall onions waiting in the wings.  It’s nice to be back on track.  Maybe a bit more hobbled, but the main gardening implements – the people – are alive and kicking and back in the saddle.  We were left unsupervised and a garden broke out!

Of course, with everything that has been going on lately, the tasks lower on the totem pole get pushed off.  I should have been tying  tomatoes onto the trellises for awhile now, but that hasn’t happened yet.  Evidently the plants in the greenhouse kind of love the place.  The walkways are overgrown and the tomatoes have hundreds of flowers.  So now we have to walk by shuffle stepping so as to not damage the plants by stepping on them.

We are going to have a bit of a heat wave the next few days so I added another ventilator fan to keep the air moving.  The fruit is staring to set so we don’t want all of this progress to get stopped in it’s tracks.  Everything is doing amazingly well.  I have to take an injured goat to the vet (probably today sometime), then I’ll get to working on the plants again.  Fortunately, plants don’t demand as much from you as those farm creatures with feet, mouths and eyes.  Having my new farm hand has been a big help.  That, and putting down the saw for awhile.  As a good friend said the other day, “You do know that you are good enough, right?”  No, not really, but thanks.  I farm to burn off the crazy…. and there is a whole lotta crazy to burn.

How many of you did THIS over the last week?  I drove out to Boulder to go to my favorite construction site recycling warehouse and yard (You think Habitat’s Restore outlets have a lot of stuff – this place is a goldmine of rich Boulderite discards).  I picked up two steel 55 gallon barrels in order to make a couple of Biochar furnaces.  This is a process that creates charcoal via gasified wood that is turned into carbon.  The end product is then inoculated with compost and worm “tea”.  This gets buried in the garden beds and can increase overall yields by up to 40%.  Biochar gets beneficial microbes into the soil to help make nutrients available to the plant’s roots.  I’ve hit a snag though.  I need a smaller barrel to go inside the 55’s as a part of the retort.  These have proven difficult to find.  Soooo, I’m brainstorming.

In order to inoculate the biochar with worm tea, one of course, must have worms.  We have a worm bin for our kitchen but it can’t possibly make enough vermicompost for a couple of acres of gardens.  So on my quest, I also scrounged up a used bathtub to make a ginormous bin to raise thousands of worms who will, in turn, provide me with righteous compost, second only to composted chicken poop.  This combination of worm castings, composted animal manure and biochar, will virtually eliminate my need for garden inputs.  It will also be helpful in building the soil for the Permaculture Food Forest I’m going to be embarking on.

Here is the almost finished Worm Hilton:

You can see the barrels on either side that will be turned into the furnaces.  I am heading back out to Ecocycle tomorrow to scrounge an old door for a cover.  This location is right by our clothesline so it will double as a table for the laundry basket when we are hanging clothes out to dry (We don’t own a dryer – the sun is just as fast here in our arid climate).

I will be ordering about 5 pounds of worms here shortly (Yes, you heard right. You order red wrigglers from folks who are obsessed with this kind of thing, because they are about the best worms for this task).  Never received worms in the mail before?  It’s a head turner to be sure.  Usually comes at the same time as the Victoria’s Secret catalog.  Win, win.  After you finish looking at bras and thongs, the worms will eat the catalog.  Junk mail turned fertilizer.

After having my little junkie putter around town car crap out a quarter of a mile from the farm on Tuesday and having to go get my truck and tow it the rest of the way, this was the highlight event of the week for me.  Does one count worms as livestock?  If so, do you have to count them?  5 lbs. is a lot of worms.