Strawbale Cold Frames

I just put together a quick and easy strawbale cold frame to grow late winter/early spring greens. It took about 30 minutes from start to finish.

The strawbales have been arranged and are waiting for a cover.

Step 1. Gather materials: straw bales and a cover. Schlepping strawbales from around the farm was the most labor intensive part of this project. I had enough extra bales lying around, but to purchase them would add about $5 a bale to the cost of the project. Sometimes you can get rained on bales for less than perfect new bales. I didn’t have any old windows lying around (just wait till I get rid of that sliding glass door!) so I used a sheet of 6 mil plastic (25 feet by 10 or 12). This cost $20 at the local big box store.

Step 2. Prepare the soil. I wanted my cold frame not too far from the house and so chose a bed that had been seeded to winter rye in the fall. I chopped up the rye, added a bucket of chicken manure compost, and smoothed the soil with a rake.

Step 3. Arrange the bales. You can see the C shape I used to arrange the bales in the photo. I do not put a fourth strawbale “wall” up because the winter sun is low, and I don’t want additional shade in the front of the growing area. Since I was using plastic sheeting as my cover, I simply let that slope down from the edges of the bales. I set my bales “on edge” so that my walls are higher.

Some people make a cube of straw bales and put an old window on top. This will create a deep frame. To minimize shade you can add crumpled newspaper or mulch or soil on the bottom to third way up the bale, then add 8 inches or so of soil. Make sure you leave enough room on top so the plants don’t hit the glass.

4. Shape the beds and plant. I created a long furrow lengthwise down the middle of the bed for irrigating when the greens are larger. I created small 1 inch trenches parallel to the irrigation trench for planting the seeds. I watered the bed thoroughly with a hose, then planted my seeds, noting in my journal what I planted where. The larger greens I planted in the back next to the straw bale and in the front I seeded mesclun which I will harvest when still small. This way I don’t have to worry about the plastic sheeting squashing larger greens in the front of the bed. Since I had extra row cover lying around, I covered the bed with that and secured with some old rebar.

See how the plastic is tucked under the baling twine. Maggie helps by napping.

5. Cover the cold frame. I tucked the plastic inside the twine at the back of the strawbale (see photo). You could also tuck the plastic under the strawbale or use clips to attach it to the twine. We have very strong spring winds here so I put additional rocks on top of the bale to weigh down the plastic. I tucked the plastic under the bales at the edges. In the front, I tucked the plastic under the railroad tie and added a t-post across the length of it for good measure.

I used a T-Post and rocks to secure the cold frame against our winds.

The next day we got quite a bit of rain, so I pulled back the plastic so the soil could get watered. The plastic goes back on at night. When your greens start growing, be sure to monitor the temperature inside your cold frame and open it up so you don’t cook your new greens.

Now I have a nice toasty secure mini greenhouse to grow my spring greens. You can also do this in the winter to extend your fall vegetables. I like these strawbale mini hoophouse/cold frames because I can move them around wherever I have open space. I don’t need to commit to a permanent hoop house location or use lumber and concrete or PVC to build it. I can simply compost the bales or use them as mulch when they decompose. The downside of this type of cold frame as opposed to a larger hoophouse is that you can’t walk in it, so if you make it very deep, managing the glass or plastic can be unwieldy.

Happy planting! – Jen

I love my maran rooster!

He’s such a sweetie. – Tree

Tree and her favorite rooster, Abner.

Happy Imbolc!

Happy Imbolc! Imbolc is an ancient celtic (or pre-celtic) holiday celebrating the lengthening daylight, marking the halfway point between winter solstice and spring equinox and honoring the goddess Brigid.

Today I’ll be planting lettuce, kale and arugula seeds in the straw bale cold frame and imagining Brigid’s fire warming them into sprouting.  – Jen

Plastic will be placed over this coldframe after planting

Herbal Salves Now Available

Four different types of herbal salves packaged in attractive one or two ounce tins are now available for sale at sunstoneherbs.com. Choose from Healing Salve, St John’s Wort Salve, Plantain Salve and Poke Root Salve. -Tree

All of our herbal salves are handcrafted in small batches using freshly harvested herbs, extra-virgin olive oil, essential oil (some) and local beeswax

The Small-Mart Revolution

I just finished The Small-Mart Revolution: How Local Businesses are Beating the Global Competition by Michael Shuman. This is a great read for those of us interested in creating stronger local economies and avoiding the planned obsolescence of big box crap-ola.

Shuman takes what could be a dry sleeping-inducing material and organizes it into informative and enjoyable sections on an important topic. The book is broken down into two sections: the first on the problem and the second on the solution. Thankfully for those of us who are all too aware of the problems at hand, the problem part is cogent and to the point. The solution part is broken down into Consumers, Investors, Entrepreneurs, Policymakers, Community Builders and Globalizers. Each chapter has a checklist of steps we can take to create change.

Highly recommended! -Jen

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Looking Back and Giving Thanks

2009 was the first year since moving to New Mexico in late 2007 that we had abundantly producing gardens. It was a joy to have vegetables, fruits and herbs from the garden again. The grocery store just can’t compete with freshly harvested food.

2009 was a busy year. We put in perennial herbs and flowers, shrubs and fruit trees, started our bamboo experiment, completed planning the layout of our urban homestead, raised a few pigs, and dug a lot of new garden beds. Jen also taught many classes on herbs and urban homesteading here and at other venues in Albuqueruqe, and we roamed around the mountains of New Mexico, getting to know our  new home a little better.

In 2010 we will continue to implement our design, putting in more gardens, digging out more bermuda grass, planting more trees, and, hopefully, we will add bees to our menagerie.

Here’s hoping your year was rich and full with all the blessings that life has to offer. Enjoy the following photo journal of 2009 at the farm.

Wishing you much health and happiness in 2010,
Jen + Tree

The beets were beautiful this year. They love our sandy soil!

Applepalooza! I have no idea what kind of apple tree this is. Probably a gala or other modern red apple.

A few lucky Maran chickens had the fun job of transforming our grass lawn into new gardens.

Quan Yin watches over the sages, sedums and penstemons.

Sage is one of my favorite medicinal herbs. Here is a row of sage started from seed waiting to be transplanted to their permanent home.

We grew a lot of squash and sunflowers. Here are some Queensland blue and butternut squash curing on our front porch.

All in a day's play. A table full of apples, chile, tomatoes, squash, cucumbers....

Wild carrot going to seed.

We planted seeds of kale, collards and chard for fall and winter harvest in late August and early September. There's nothing better than kale and collards after a frost. So sweet!

Stacking Functions -or Ode on a Locust Tree

I spent the afternoon bagging up locust pods for my goats to eat. The locust tree is a perfect example of what Permaculturists calls “stacking functions,” meaning each design element should serve more than one purpose.

Trees do this anyway, right? Among many other functions they clean our air, stabilize soil, act as a sponge holding water in their root zone, provide habitat for insects and birds and maybe humans. All this just doing what they do best -being trees.

These ripe honey locust pods will hang in the trees all winter until strong winds knock them down for me to pick up and feed to the goaties.

If you think about tree selection and placement, your tree can provide food for you as well as other critters; placed on the south side of your home, a deciduous tree can provide shade during the summer, and let in sun for passive solar heating during the winter. They can provide privacy screening, serve as windbreaks, and the list goes on.

The locust is one such many splendored tree. It is a low water use tree, grows quickly, provides a gentle dappled shade, can be used for fence posts or firewood, provides forage for honeybees, birds and insects, and it will bear copious curly brownish-red pods after the leaves fall in the autumn. The pods will fall, too. Be prepared for that. But as a legume (it fixes its own nitrogen, too!), it provides nutritious edible fodder for my goats. And the chickens love the fresh high protein leaves and will strip a sapling dry.

Honey Locust Root Nodules

The nutritional value of a locust pod falls somewhere around that of oats or barley, around 15% protein. Supposedly you can grind the pods and make flour, but I would be concerned about soaking or roasting them first before using them as human food.

We have at least 20 thornless honey locust and many more thorny seedling trees. So far, I’ve bagged about ten 50-pound potato sacks full of pods, and they just keep coming. They make a quick shade tree, growing 5-10 feet in one season here in the Rio Grande Valley. They make a great living fence post, and you can coppice them for livestock forage.

They can be considered a weed tree, though, so think carefully before planting them. We have the majority along the western and southern border of our property to help diffuse the powerful sustained winds we get coming off the mesa.

Honey locust trees are spaced about 10 feet apart along the western border of our property. They help diffuse the intense western summer sun and harsh winds coming off the mesa.

Perennializing Onions

Read this post to see how these onions grew from spring-planted sets that went to seed.

I had an interesting experience growing storage onions this year. I grow perennial onions: walking or topsetting onions and potato/multiplier onions. I also always grow typical storage onions, biennial plants that you harvest the first year or the second (if you’re planting sets).

I usually plant sets or transplants for my storage onions. I didn’t start any of my own sets or transplants this year, but found myself browsing the plant section in our local giant box home improvement store while waiting for Tree to pick up some necessary part.

It was early spring, and of course, the aisles were filled with tubs of onion sets, shallots, bulbs, rhubarb -you get the idea. It’s like going to a grocery store hungry. Pretty soon, my arms were laden with sets of red, white and yellow storage onions.

The sets went into the ground with no problem. They sprouted, grew beautifully, and then several rows started flowering. This is a danger when planting sets, you are tricking the plant into producing a bulb in its second year instead of bolting and producing a flower stalk. Remember, when a biennial flowers, that’s it. The bulb puts all of its energy into producing a woody flower stalk and not an edible onion.

Since I had so many rows of onions from my armful of sets, I wasn’t concerned about losing part of the harvest. Plus, onion flowers are beautiful, and they attract beneficial insects, so I left them as a flower border. By the end of the summer, the flowers had turned to seed and started spilling onto the garden.

By early fall, new baby onions had sprouted. They continued to sprout, and now, in mid-November, we have a variety of tiny baby onion seedlings in addition to larger scallion sized seedlings. So, that’s a natural benefit of letting onions going to seed, but something even more interesting happened (and now I’m getting to the meat of my post).

Each onion set that produced a flower stalk, multiplied into two to four more onions often with the dried stalk still in the center of the new cluster (think of the way hardneck garlic grows). So instead of acting like biennials, where the plant sets seeds and dies, these morphed into a plant similar to garlic, shallots or multiplier onions.

This onion bulb grew from an onion that had gone to seed.

And the bulbs were a good size and flavorful. I made a delicious crustless quiche with carmelized onions, goat milk, goat cheese, eggs, swiss chard, fresh thyme and parmesan. Mmmm.

As for the onions, I have about a 10 foot row left. I’m pulling many, mulching some, and trying to see if I can get the seedlings to overwinter. Since these were certainly a hybrid onion, who knows what the seedlings will produce. I’ll let you know what happens in the spring. I’d love to have a multiplier onion that sets larger bulbs than potato onions.  – Jen

Autumn at Sunstone

The sun shines brilliant the golden autumn leaves of the Cottonwood tree. A storm hides the Sandia Mountains usually visible in the background.

Sunlight on cottonwood tree.

Though this photo doesn’t do the apricot tree justice (it’s a day or two before prime color), it has the most gorgeous fall color of all our fruit trees.

One of our fruit trees planted by the former owner of our place.