#backyard project

I’ve got a project in mind, and it needs bricks, so I got to dissembling the decaying barbecue again to build up a stash.  If I can have enough bricks ready to go from the start, I have a better chance of completing my project.

Hello everyone! If you actively read my blog you may remember me saying about 2 weeks that I would be away on a trip to visit a garden. Well, now I’ve arrived back at home and I can say that the trip was absolutely marvelous! Posts regarding my trip and the garden I visited will be up within the next week or so. Before I write about that though, I want to share a little bit about the additions I made to my garden right before I left.

The weekend before I started my vacation (Saturday June 10 and Sunday June 11) my family and I put together an amazing raised garden. There was a rather large area of deadish grass that made for the perfect spot to host the garden atop it. The garden is two different tiers and consists of 3 different sections, each being 8 feet long by 4 feet wide. I constructed the structure using twelve 8inx8in Planter Wall Blocks, ten 2inx6inx8ft wood planks and eight 2inx6inx4ft wood planks (or four 2inx6inx8ft boards cut in half) which is all available at The Home Depot. Each brick was about $3 and the price of wood varies on the type you get, but overall the total price was pretty fair for the amount of space you’re going to have.

Once everything got home we started to put it together right away. One thing I really liked about the materials is that they fit together really nicely and are quick to build. I started assembling the garden on the furthest most left side. I laid down two of the blocks and put one of the 4ft planks between them. From there I started to build outward (starting left and constructing towards the right), using two of the 8ft planks, one on each side, stabilizing them with blocks at the end. I continued to do this until I had three, level sections. After my sections were finished I added a second layer to the two outside sections making them twice as high as the middle section.

After the wood and blocks were all placed I got ready to put in the soil. Because there was so much space to fill, I laid down a layer of wood mulch beforehand to take up some of the empty space and then proceeded to put in the soil afterwards. 

For the section on the far left, I wanted to transfer my beans and pea plants into it so I placed three large, flat metal arbors in the middle to support the plants so that they could climb up it as they continue to grow.

After the arbors were in I threw in specialized soil for vegetable growth and then I replanted my pea, lima bean and green bean into the garden. In the corner I put my eggplant plant and on the backside I had my corn and bell pepper sprouts.

In the middle section, the most shallow section, I planted all my pumpkin. These plants looked the worst after the replant because their roots had not yet adjusted which led to all their leaves to droop. But luckily, within the next couple days most of them perked up and even started to show new growth.

The section to the furthest right, is full of all sorts of leafy greens. This is where I replanted all my lettuces and other greens like spinach, kale and more. 

After everything was planted, I sprinkled in some plant food, crushed eggshells and fresh coffee grounds into the garden. Once everything was good to go, my dad and boyfriend helped me hammer in posts so that I could put up a little fence around the garden to keep out squirrels and our dogs.

We have pondered over chicken coop options for weeks. How big? Raised or ground level? Movable or stationary? Originally we had decided to set aside some money to build a really nice chicken coop ourselves. Then, of course, we hit some snags. One, which we had anticipated and still hadn't figured out was how to transport all the very large materials without having to pay for delivery (yes, we really wish we had a truck). The other was Geo got sick and there went all our chicken coop money. Oops. Now we had to figure out something entirely different on the fly. The only option we really had was to try to figure out how we could turn this old, rusting shed into a working chicken coop:

I had my work cut out for me. We had been using it for storing firewood, and it was still full of miscellaneous junk that the previous owners had left for us to deal with. As you'll find out, I'm starting to put some of that junk to some pretty interesting uses these days.

I started by clearing out all the junk, moving the wood to another location and raking out all the leaves and such on the floor.

Then I found all the old hornets nests, so I scrubbed the walls. Hopefully, the hornets won't come back. The next problem was to figure out how to put working doors on. I had found some scrap pieces of lumber in the attic, and we had some chicken wire already. So I spent $15 for some dual material screws and some nice, stainless steel outdoor door hinges. Even though the entire rest of the structure is rusting, the hinges will be shiny! Sigh. I started with cutting the pieces to make a basic frame and screwed it all together.

Then I stapled chicken wire to cover it and attached it to the sheet metal by pre-puncturing holes in the metal and attaching the hinges with screws and washers. They're not perfect, but they'll do.

I'm going to use a chain and deadbolt for closing them, since raccoons are very smart and can figure out how to open pretty much any kind of lock. Since building these doors I've also read that raccoons can actually rip right through chicken wire, so in part two, you'll see what I (hopefully) brilliantly come up with to reinforce the doors while still allowing air flow to get into the coop! I think I have a plan. There had been a nasty old metal cabinet sitting in the corner of the shed and I thought that it had potential to made a nice nesting box. I removed the doors and gave it a good wash. It still looked pretty terrible. What self-respecting chicken would want to lay an egg in that?

I found a can of  spray paint that you could use over rust in the garage, so I scrubbed away as much of the loose paint and rust as I could and gave it a makeover. It now looks like a dignified nest, especially once it gets some nice clean pine shavings in there.

Now, raccoons and other such cute, but irritating and chicken-devouring 'varmints' can also burrow underneath chicken coop walls and right into the middle of your helpless chickens that are relying on you to keep them safe. So I went into our "junkyard" as we call it, and dug around for what I could find to try and solve this problem. I came up with large, heavy paving stones. Andrew helped me haul a bunch of them over to the coop and we laid them out on the floor. I used sand to fill in the cracks between them to hold them still and to prevent any chickens possibly scratching away the bedding and getting a foot caught or something. I'm a paranoid chicken mommy, okay?

Next, the chickens need a roost of some kind, so up into the attic I went again. I came back with an old broom handle, which I secured to the sides of the coop with a lot of liquid nails.  You want to use something round and smooth for a chicken roost, to avoid the chickens damaging their feet, and the round shape makes it easier for them to hold on to. It's also a good idea to have something that's easy to clean underneath your roost, since chickens defecate the most while roosting, and having something separate from the regular bedding underneath makes it easier to clean. A clean chicken coop = healthier chickens. So, you guessed it, back into the attic. I found, of all things, a bathroom counter. Well, kids, you gotta work with what you have. I had a spare bathroom counter and now my chickens have a poop counter. (The counter itself wasn't very heavy, and Andrew is just as paranoid about coons as I am, so he put bricks around the edges because he was worried that a coon could shimmy under the lightweight counter. He's probably right.)

I had been perusing Pinterest for chicken ideas, and I saw a neat little doohicky for chicken feed. I had some spare PVC pipe laying around, and I just needed a few extra pieces to make the rest. I spent about $22 total making this nifty self-filling chicken feeder:

Pretty cool, huh? So the chicken coop is almost done, and in part two next week, I'll show you the final steps I'm going to do to complete it. Hopefully the chickens approve. I need a couple more next boxes (you should have one for every 2-3 chickens you have), make an elevated space to put their water, since I don't wanted to figure out how to hang a water can from the rusty ceiling), finish securing the doors and put down bedding. In other happenings on 'the farm', we've got some potatoes flowering, which is the plant saying "Hey, looky! I'm growing tubers under ground!" Yay!

Some more veggie vines started growing randomly in some rocks in the 'junkyard', and they already have vegetables growing. I'm pretty sure it's zucchini, but not 100% on that. Of course, the plant that I didn't put in the ground and didn't even really notice until last week is the first plant to bear food. Rude.  I need to go have a chat with my acorn squash plants that are rapidly taking over the garden, but not producing anything as of yet.

I'm working on finishing all the chicken wire tomato cages that I'm making. I've made about 35 so far, and I had 8 more to go until I went outside earlier today and found a tomato plant inexplicably growing nearby our asparagus. Now I have 9 more cages to go.  (I watch Dr. Who while I make them, so I guess it isn't SO bad.) But what the hell, Mother Nature? I mean, thanks, I love tomato plants, but where on earth did this one come from?! I certainly didn't plant one there, and I didn't put any extra seeds outside. I'm  so confused, but I guess once you have 43 tomato plants, what's one more, right? Speaking of tomato plants, a couple of mine are turning into real monsters. They got really happy once I started putting cages on them. Happy little tomato monsters.

Finish your garden with bamboo borders. Eco-friendly, affordable, and easy to use. 

Composting. What is it? Well, basically, it's piling layers of kitchen scraps, grass clippings (if you have a yard), shredded paper, leaf mulch, coffee grounds, etc, and letting it rot until it turns into this utterly fabulous soil additive that your plants will love you for putting in the dirt in which they grow. In turn, you'll love your plants for growing extra healthy, and producing a lot of fruit, veggies, flowers and leaves. Circle of happy growing, and yes, that circle includes a big pile of rotting vegetable scraps. It's beautiful. Composting is actually quite easy. Now, I borrowed several books from the library on composting to gain more knowledge on the subject, and I'm going to compress all that into, hopefully, a post that makes sense. One very important point that I gleaned from these compost compendiums is this: Composting can be as incredibly complicated and scientific as you want it to be. You can get into specific temperature and humidity points, different ratios of brown materials that provide the carbon (things like leaves and shredded paper) to green materials that provide the nitrogen (kitchen scraps and coffee grounds) based on what temperature you want your compost to be and so on and so forth. If you are super into science and biology and the like, that's awesome, keep it up and have as complicated and exact a compost pile as will make your heart happy. For you other folks who would like to reap the benefits of composting without much hassle: let's talk. First, I want to point out that composting can be done anywhere. Live in a studio apartment? You bet your butt you can compost. Before we bought our house, Andrew and I lived in a medium sized apartment in the middle of the Salt Lake City metro area, and composted. Now, you won't be able to compost in any great amounts, but you will probably be container gardening, and that won't require as much compost anyway. All you need for small space composting is a 5 gallon food safe plastic bucket with a lid. Use a screwdriver, an ice pick or what have you, to poke multiple holes in the sides and lid to allow for air flow. Note: air flow is something that is very important for healthy compost. You'll need a trowel for turning your compost in the bucket. Next, place some old newspaper in a shallow plastic container that your bucket can sit in (the plastic trays that go under garden pots work great for this, and they are very inexpensive.) Then, simply start layering brown and green materials, and keep stir in on a regular basis. Change the newspaper underneath the bucket as needed, as it will get wet. Usually, if you want warm compost (which is the easiest way to get compost in a reasonable amount of time), you'll want about a ratio of 30:1 Carbon to Nitrogen. If you have too much nitrogen in your mix, i.e., just a pile of rotting kitchen scraps with nothing for the microorganisms to eat, you're going to end up with a reeking, leaking, slimy mess that won't do much for your plants. Having lots of carbon for the composting microorganisms to consume will insure that you end up with healthy, sweet-smelling, awesomesauce compost that will provide a ton of nutrients to your growing plants. Now, this ratio does not mean you need 30 buckets of leaves for every bucket of kitchen scraps you have. That ratio is simply the carbon to nitrogen. I'm getting too science-y, aren't I? If you really want to get into specific carbon to nitrogen ratios of items commonly put in compost, this post is an excellent resource.  Otherwise a good rule of thumb is for every shovel, trowel, or handful of green materials you put into your compost, add 2 shovels, trowels, or handfuls of brown materials. This is the ratio usually used because most of the time brown materials, such as hay, leaves and shredded paper, have a lot of 'fluff' or air that makes them less dense when piled together as opposed to a heavy pile of say, grapefruit peels. The thing you really want to focus on is keeping enough brown material for the composting microorganisms to eat, but not so much that you just have a pile of leaves or hay with some little bits of compost in them somewhere. Balance is everything. How long your compost takes to be usable depends on how much you're composting, and how often you turn it. Cold compost means that you rarely turn it, and have a higher carbon to nitrogen ratio, and therefore the decomposition will take much longer, sometimes around a year! Hot compost is a more complicated and labor intensive, and don't we already have enough to do? So, let's stick with warm compost. I try to turn my compost pile every three days. Every 3 days isn't a rule, but do try to turn it at least once a week. This keeps the brown material mixed evenly throughout, and helps with air flow as well. This method will result in ready to use compost in about 2-3 months, again, depending on how much compost you are working with. I could go on at length about all the different containers you can use to compost, and you should research what would work best for your situation, but for today, I'm going to show you what I use. When we dug up the seating area the former owners of our house had, we ended up with around 90 old cinder blocks. I found a great idea for building a 3 bin compost system out of cinder blocks while reading one of my library compost books. Now, unless you are planning on having a large amount of compost, a 3 bin system really isn't necessary. If you have a small garden, or container garden, a single bin will serve you just fine. But I figured, I had the cinder blocks and had nothing better to do with them, and we will probably be trying to have a large amount of compost in the future, so I went ahead and built a 3 bin system. Before you ask, yes, they were heavy (thanks to my big brother for helping to carry them all, he's a beast), yes, my back hurt after, but it was free and it works awesome! This is what it looks like:

You can see there is plenty of shredded paper and dead leaves for the green materials to consume. The far left bin will be for materials waiting to be added to the compost (most likely leaf mulch in our case), the middle for the materials that are currently composting, and the third for compost ready to be used. That little pile in the middle is from when we first put the system together. Here's what it looks like about 3 weeks later:

The center compost, as you can see, has consumed most of the shredded paper and has become a more condensed pile. We added some leaves to the first compartment so we can easily add them as needed to the center compartment.