Hugelkultur 2

Where we are at part two of our Hugelkultur. We just finished putting all the logs inside it so the next thing we are going to do is put left over hay that the sheep left in the barn and on top of that put in sheep manure on top. After that we cover it up with the dirt and plant what we want to plant which in this case is going to be my blackberries.

We are putting together a video too explaining a lot more of Hugelkultur

Sam

Hugelkultur garden bed

We started a new project called Hugelkultur- Bed.

"Hugelkulture is the practice of composting large woody material to create a raised garden bed. It is a way of dealing with excess amounts of woody garden wastes, for example prunings, hedge clippings, brassica stems, or brashwood.

The name comes from German - hügelkultur translates as "hill culture".

As the years pass, the deep soil of the raised bed becomes incredibly rich and loaded with soil life. As the wood shrinks, it makes more tiny air pockets - so your hugelkultur becomes self tilling. The first few years, the composting process will slightly warm the soil giving a slightly longer growing season, in temperate and cold climates".

The main two reasons we love it is that 1. It takes our wasted fallen logs from our pecan trees and makes a use for it. 2. It will act like a sponge in a couple of yrs which will save us in watering we are hoping especially in this southTexas heat!

Some people don't even dig holes they just pile the wood and bury it with dirt, but we wanted to dig the holes. Because of the clay we have in our area we could only go down about 1 foot. We did a bit of it with the plow from our tractor then the rest we did by hand.

We plan to plant blackberrys in this bed and hopefully a covercrop on top.

I will post more photos as we fill the bed.

Sam

Garden has been pretty good this year. It rained a lot so we got our garden in later then we hoped. We did get lots of cucumbers which we canned into pickels a relishes & a lot of them that got too big we used for feed for the chickens which they just loved.

Our pear tree produced twice as much as it did last year. I think we made at least 9 large quart jars of pears. They didnt come out as sweet as we would have liked but I think they will be good to eat. Last year we only got one basket full of pears from two trees, this year two, hopefully next year 4!

It got so hot and I had to be at the hospital a lot with my father that the garden got away from me. Now we have the hard task of pulling up all the weeds and starting over again for our winter garden.

Hopefully it will cool off some so we can go out to the garden more often.

Sam

Date is wrong on the camera. It was shut off for awhile had to restart it didnt realize it was set for 2008? lol

Mother hen with her chicks hunting for those juicy bugs
Green beans climbing up the corn stalk
My daughters flowers
Cucumbers growing up the trelis

Well we spent a lot of time gardening today, we did mowing and weed eating the garden was getting lost in all the grass. Our lawn mower was down and had to wait awhile for the part to come in.

We have been getting a lot of ..continue later..late

Ok so we picked up these 450 plus bricks from someone on the craigslist the other day for $50 we priced it and it would have cost us $220 to buy it at store brand new so we made out like a bandit :)



Ok above picture is not mine I borrowed it from www.myedibleyard.blogspot hope they don't mind me borrowing it. This is sort of what we want to do with the bricks. Its called a "spiral herb garden" Hubby showed it to me and said he would build me two, one for my herbs the other for my strawberrys if I could find the bricks cheap. You should have seen me afterwards checking the craigslist morning, noon and night lol.

When you find a good deal on craigslist the thing is you have to be fast on contacting them and done your research on the actual cost of an item. I was lucky on this one, I was the second caller. The lady Melissa said a guy called said he would have to see if it matched his house and will get back to her..duh!...by that time I called told her if she had it still I would take it...please hold for me...I told her what I wanted to do with it to be friendly. Asked her when she wanted it picked up, she said today or 2morrow I told her I would be there 2morrow..done deal...Most people want to get rid of the stuff fast.

Once in order to get some bricks I gave the guy some fresh farm eggs lol sometimes a lil bartering does it.

Just to let y'all know if your in the San Antonio Texas area...you might want to check out the City wide garage sale this Saturday 8am-4pm..going to be a great sale.

Sam

Memorial Day Weekend gardening

Today we spread the mulch all around our garden. We still need more mulch if you believe it or not.

My raised beds surrounded by mulch now :)

Mulch spread amoung my berries

The kids below spreading mulch on our garden. Tommy is stomping on it for us.

Miranda showing off one of my tomatoes below

This picture below is off our 12yds of compost being delivered to our house. Cost us about $290 with delivery from SA. Double dark mulch.

Helotes

Good picture of one of their compost


Great Hydroponic system at the Helotes Center.

Today we traveled to the Helotes Nature Center

It was a good class lots of information and we made some good contacts, best of all it was free. We have been thinking of building a hydroponics are self. Hubby has tons of information on it already its just the doing and having the time to do this is the problem.

They will be having tons of classes on permaculture & other classes. I recommend if y'all have the time you should take one.

Later that day at the Tractor supply store on the way home we saw these lil tomato plants for 50cents. What a great deal but we knew it wouldnt grow well so late in the season in the dirt but we thought wow if we had a hydroponic system running it would have fit there so well.

We talked a lot about our rain system we wanted to put up today as we drove into SA mainly because hubbie had his ITUNEs playing with a segment of "Rain water systems" we even looked and priced some of the containers at the Tractor supply store. If we wanted to go a cheaper route there R tons of them for sale on the craigslisting all the time. $99 for 275 gal water totes is not so bad.

Lot of gardening dreaming today :) good day.

Garden time

Well I worked 5 hours in the garden today, tilling, using the new weed eater and pulling out grass! I planted some Peppers, chili's, carrots, lettuce, cantelope, squash. Glad the weather was being good. It was cool and the sun stayed away though I could really use it now to dry things up. Some of my smaller tomato plants R not doing so good..too much rain!

Need to take the mower into our garden soon. Looks like the extra fencing is keeping out my chickens, the lil devils! I need to move the coop farther out to the field but waiting for it to dry a bit.

Can't add any pictures my camera cord to charge it up is missing been looking for it for two days now!

I need a shower I smell like dirt lol

Sam

Gardening update May 2010

This is our future garden some day right now its where we put our seasonal turkeys and sheep. Its right near the garden so all we have to do is take down the fence when we R ready to add more to R garden.



This is a side view of our garden. You can see a bit of where the sheep R grazing. Right now they R putting a lot of much needed manure down.

These R my berries they R about ready to eat, I have three more but this the biggest. I know, I know I have to weed out the grass around them.

My tomatos R doing really good. I have Picked and ate some cherry ones already yummy. My onions R growing right between them R doing really good too. Chickens snuck in and ate my lettuce seeds so I have to start all over again.

The start of our garden this year has gotten started late becuz of the rains. Its all ready to be planted now. This one up top is our newest addition to the garden this year. This picture above is a new section we planted this year.

Another view of the garden ready to be planted. We worked really hard to finish it up this Saturday. Suppose to get some rain this weekend so not sure if we should plant or not waiting on the weather to tell us

Hog panels used as raised beds

From old blog
This is our raised beds how we got started. Its in my other blog.

Click here for raised beds


having trouble with html on here- just in case paste it

http://frugalcountrymom.blogspot.com/2008/04/spring-garden-burn-baby-burn.html

Garden ready 2010

Tom and Miranda taking down the garden tent to get ready to plow the field this coming month. Its too wet and muddy right now so we have to wait. The sheep are coming in the background to finish up whats left of the grasses.

We have a pile of beautiful Compost near the barn that needs to be taken to our garden too. I am so looking forward to spring.

Garden update for June 2009

My tomatoes I have been picking at least 2-5 a day

Everything is starting to pop up, lime a beans, lettuce, green beans, squashes etc.. This is our nifty water system too it works great its made with pvc pipes

Green beans and lettuce are doing good. The green beans are climbing fast and are already shading the lettuce

My tomatoes are doing great!

Ok so I think I have caught up on my picture taking of my garden for now.

Another Garden Update

This is my son above being creative on holding down the bags so we could put mulch on it I thought it was funny. This is another raised bed we are doing we use used feed bags.

Lettuce from last year that started to grow, not bad at all.

My tomatoes are starting to grow by the time we get back from Disney World we should have a few.

This has taken me a while to post this sorry so the dates on it are not that accurate for the days posted. This is the start of our new garden this year. We got an attachment to our tractor so it was easy to pull and move the dirt.

This is mixed up with compost from our sheep plus three years of turkey manure from our Pasture Poultry mobile.

Sam

My tomatoes are growing I am surprised its so early yet. These Better Bush Tomatoes grow pretty fast and well and they are soooo sweet to taste.

I have 6 growing right now and plan to get more soon. We spent the weekend mucking out the sheep barn and got it all into our field where we are planting a larger garden. My husband then took our tractor with his new toy (PTO driven rotor tiller) attachment and mixed it into now tilled soil. It looks great.

Now if we can keep the dogs out of the garden we will do very well.

We also bought some banana plants from the craigs listing and they are growing really well. I put some organic plant food in them today also in my fruit trees and all my growing tomatoes. Hopefully this will work and help them grow.

Gearing up for Spring

Gearing up for spring we had to take out all the old plants still there the only thing I left was some curled parsley, love it plan to put in a lot more! Grass is overun in some parts hubby wants to burn it but he better watch my parsley

I plan to put one more of these plots in when ever hubby gets a chance. I also messed with my compost today, I really need some manure for it I have a bit in the rabbit cage but it needs to be mixed so I put some chicks in there to do the job.

I really need to get some sheep manure but I would have to get the tractor in there and they are all having babys in the barn right now so will have to wait.

,

June 9, 2008

Well here is the last update on my garden before I let it go for the winter. I wanted to work on it so bad for winter but alas not meant to be. I will be luck enough to get it going for 2009 spring.

May 17, 2008

Well my garden has been updated a lot. I took off the chicken wire around it because it was squishing my garden. My husband put a fence around it so now Bobo the dog wont be digging or laying in it.

I bought this week the tomatoe wires from Walmart in Hondo. I had looked for them all over San Antonio at 3 other walmarts and Lowes but only found the huge ones for about $6.00 each these only cost around $1.23 each. These were smaller and fit perfect in my square foot garden.
If you look really close you will see the small green tomotoes growing :)

If you look close too you will see my new watering system that I got from walmart. It was a 75ft long seeper flat soaker hose. It was made out of Nylon Mesh a lot different from the other soakers I had seen. I didnt like the others. This one was flat and as soon as I put the hose on it inflated and soaked up everything really fast. I was really impressed.

I bought two of them at $15 each I think it was a great bargain. I pulled weeds today and also mowed the lawn. It was a good day. It sprinkled for a bit today but later it just got sunny I think it was in the high 80's today lovely.

Sam

How does your garden grow

Thur May 8 2008

Yes that is chicken wire around my garden and its not even put up right just drapped around my garden. The dog got in one day and tore up two of my tomotoe plants and some onions. The really big green stuff is green beans growing it seems to be doing the best. I've had to spray it recently with a mixture of water, hot sauce and starch to keep the peel bugs away.

So far its been working but its only been a day/night and I didnt see any on them this afternoon. Time will tell, everything else is growing really nice and I got tomotoes growing already in my bush near my roses I am so excited. Our fruit trees have some apples, plums and aproicots growing too.

My chicks are doing really good they are sort of skitish when I get near them they scare really easily. So far I havent seen any dead chicks and the temp is keeping ok, I opened up the side window to it to let some air in.

I went to go pick up my local veggies today in Castroville and found out they will be having a farmers market once a month in Castroville it got me thinking about selling eggs someday there when the chicks are grown. Its only once a month but that is enough time for me. Maybe if I get my garden going more I can sell some of that along with honey and pecans too. Right now I have all the cutomers I can handle for all the stuff we have on our farm.

Speaking of honey I bought some locally in San Antonio the other day just to compare and have some in stock, boy was it light, in fact it was too light. It didn't have much taste it was like it was strained or something I didnt really like it. I won't buy from there again. I am sure everyone else loves it from the group but if you have had some of our honey or even the honey from the old man in Devine that sells it you would see the difference.

Honey season is coming up in August. I have to remember to save some of the cone for my highschool friend Leah. She asked me last year and I completly forgot, hopefully I will remember this year. I need more jars! I saw some at the thrift shop Hospice the other day for 25 cents each I am not sure if that is a good price or not I need to compare.

Well thats about it for today I need to go do chores and close up my dads pecan house for the night. He should be back in June he said. Our income tax check rebate thingie came in today so I sent him $300 since we claim him in our taxes.

The lady at the tax office said it was better to let us claim him then give him some money so that we we can get the tax credit on our income tax. It worked out really good. Dad said he is going to use the money to make it back home from California. He said he was hoping the gas will go down but I told him not to count on it. He was going to wait till July but I think he wants to come back sooner.

Got to do chores
Sam

April 23, 2008

Its hard to see but my garden is starting to grow now. So far I have planted and that is growing is tomotoes, onions, yellow pepers two of them, lettuce, carrots, radishes, peppers and green beans. I will try to be planting okra, climbing peas and pototoes, but I need to get to my compost first for the pototoes.

I am having trouble with the dog digging on the part I havent planted yet so yesterday I bought some cover for the plants I hope to get to that today too. I bought the dog a pool so he can cool off hopefully he will go there instead of my garden.

Hubby bought some fencing this weekend for the part of our field near the garden. We plan to put the sheep there to graze then later my chicks when they come out of the brooder, this way they are double safe from predators including my dog who killed 20 of them last year.

This is a great place to put our turkeys too. He was going to put the fence up this last weekend but he got sick so it will have to wait. This weekend hubby is going to a gun show in San Antonio with a friend and I am going to flea market a tad. Later on we are going to see that movie Expelled its something hubby wants to see I would rather go see Iron Man hahaha but I am happy to just be with hubby and usually I pick the movies so should be interesting.

Miranda my daughter is going to her friends Katies house for a few hours and Tommy will be at our gym for kids night out where they will be making fiesta floats, watching movies and eating pizza and of course playing in the gym. Should be a nice date night. If I am lucky I might get dinner too hahaha
Well thats about it for now I have tons to do today.
Sam aka Frugalcountrymom