How Low Can You Go?

February is such a tempting time of the year.  It's still cold, but spring feels like it’s just around the corner, and we are anxious to get things rolling.  One of the big things that we want to do to increase how much food we grow in our backyard is to lengthen the growing season.  If you simply rely on Mother Nature, the frost-free date in central Iowa isn’t until May 10^th.  We aren’t willing to wait that long, so we’re taking matters into our own hands.

Last year we built a cold frame and we plan to use it again this year.  This season we’ve decided to also try a low tunnel.  A low tunnel is essentially the same thing as a cold frame, just a different shape, and the end goal is the same.  It’s a small structure that uses the greenhouse effect to warm the soil and protect plants from the cooler outdoor temperatures.

Lots of places sell low tunnel kits, but we thought it looked simple enough to just build one ourselves.  We even found this great example.  We picked up a few supplies, and built this handy low tunnel in just a couple of hours.

To anchor the low tunnel, we used 6-inch long pieces of ¾-inch diameter PVC fastened to our raised beds.  We drilled a couple of holes through one sidewall of each piece so that we could fit the head of a screw through it.  Then we simply screwed these anchors to both sides of our raised beds spaced about 2 feet apart.

The basic structure of the low tunnel is arched pieces of ½-inch diameter CPVC (chlorinated polyvinyl chloride) pipe.  We looked at regular ½-inch PVC first, but the CPVC was more ductile and only a little more expensive.  It would be easier to bend the CPVC into a hoop shape without cracking it, so we decided it was worth a little extra cost.  The CPVC was sold in ten-foot long sections, but that made the low tunnel a little too tall.  After cutting each piece down to nine feet, the height looked much better.

The ends of the CPVC hoops slide right into the PVC anchors.  Next we added a “spine” of ¾-inch PVC across the tops of the hoops to help make the low tunnel a little more rigid.  The spine is fastened to the hoops with just a couple of plastic cable ties.

The last step was to drape a sheet of 6 mil plastic sheeting over the PVC “skeleton.”  The sheet of plastic should be large enough to reach all the way to the ground on all four sides of the low tunnel.  We’re holding the sheet of plastic to the ground with some landscaping blocks and railroad ties that we had lying around the yard.  This traps the heat inside the low tunnel and stops the wind from blowing our plastic sheeting away.

One really nice thing about this design is that we can always add anchors to our other raised beds so that we can move the low tunnel to any garden box we choose.  This low tunnel should be an easy way to start our veggies earlier in the spring, and keep growing things later in the fall.  It’s a simple and inexpensive way to stretch the Iowa growing season and produce even more fresh food!

Home Tweet Home

As our chickens have been growing quickly over the past few weeks, so has their backyard home. We showed you the original concept for the chicken coop several posts ago, but now we can show you the real thing!

First we chose the spot where we wanted to place the chicken coop. We took some time to level out the soil and placed some landscaping pavers under our floor sections. Leveling the soil helps the rest of the coop stand up straight, and the pavers should keep the wood from being in direct contact with the soil, which would cause it to rot.

The wall pieces were actually assembled in our basement over the winter, so that step went pretty quickly.  We just laid out the walls, stood them up, and fastened them together. We're glad we took the time to build these last winter, because it was a big time-saver during construction.

After the walls were standing, we raised the roof! Both literally and figuratively. This step was a little tricky just because the roof was a large, heavy piece that we needed to lift 8 feet off the ground. That required two people, each with their own ladder, to lift the roof and climb the ladders in synchronization.

Things really started to look like a chicken coop after we attached the sheathing, windows, and door. That's the same charming, used door that we picked up at the ReStore several months ago. It looked much better after a fresh coat of paint. The sheathing is just several sheets of OSB (oriented strand board) that we cut to the proper size for each wall.  We installed the windows backwards, so that we can open them from the outside. This allows us to get some air flow through the coop to provide ventilation and keep the temperature down in the summer.

It's important to keep the chicken coop dry, so we took lots of care to seal up the roof using roofing caulk. We even laid down tar paper and asphalt shingles. We hadn't shingled anything before, but luckily the internet can teach you to do anything! This handy YouTube video was a great resource for us. The coop has been through a couple of rain storms already and we haven't seen any signs of a leak.

It required a lot of discussion at the hardware store, but we finally settled on the perfect shade of blue to paint the outside walls of the coop. The color pairs nicely with our bright compost bin, and has just the right amount of country charm with a little seaside flair mixed in.

The outdoor run is covered with 1/2" hardware cloth (wire mesh) to keep the chickens in and most importantly to keep predators out. You might think that we don't have to worry about predators in our urban neighborhood, but that's not the case. Cities have lots of animals that can harm chickens, including raccoons, foxes, hawks, and domestic dogs. We haven't finished this yet, but we'll bury the hardware cloth around the perimeter of the run to keep animals from digging under it.

Now that they are fully feathered (about 4-5 weeks) the ladies (plus Frenchie) have moved out into their new home. They were a little nervous about it at first, but now they seem to be settled in nicely. As far as we can tell, they like their new coop better than their old cardboard box.

This chicken coop was a lot of work, but we are thrilled with how it's turned out. The two of us didn't really have much carpentry experience, but by taking it one step at a time, we've built an attractive coop that will keep our backyard flock healthy and safe for many years.
This post has been shared at Simple Lives Thursday.

March (Gardening) Madness

As you may recall from our last post, we said our farm has been growing in more than one way. And while it's hard to top the excitement of seeing plants sprouting up where you've sown a few tiny seeds, recent developments come pretty darn close. We've been working like crazy the past few weekends to take advantage of the mild weather and get most of our garden beds prepped for the upcoming season. But to truly appreciate the magnitude of where we are, we had to take a look back at where we came from.

Our first garden bed, built and placed last October. The former owner's playset is still standing in our way. We took that down late last year to make way for more garden.

Last weekend - the previously mentioned garlic bed and cold frame have been joined by four more raised beds.

At the end of the day today, we've got a grand total of 11 raised beds for a whopping 336 square feet of plantable space! And we're not even finished yet! There's still a chicken coop to be added, and four more vegetable beds. By the time we're done, we'll have almost as much square footage of garden as we had living space in our first apartment. So, yeah, we've definitely been doing some growing.

Right now most of these beds are empty, but we've already got crops planted in three of them. There's the garlic we started last fall, the cool-season vegetables we planted last weekend in the cold frame, and just today we filled a box with onion sets. Onion sets are mini onion bulbs that have been started from seed by a nursery company (in our case Earl May). As a gardener, the only thing you need to do is put them in the ground and keep them watered. By the end of the season, each set will have grown into a full size, home-grown onion. This is a great project for the beginner gardener.

Another really fun plant for beginners and veterans alike is one we have in the cold frame: radishes! Radishes may have a love-them or hate-them flavor, but almost everyone loves to grow them for one particular reason. We started ours last week, and now...

Almost every last one of them has sprouted! Radishes are great because they're traditionally the first vegetable to plant outdoors, first to sprout, and first to harvest. These little guys will be ready for us to enjoy in less than a month. And whether you can't get enough of that peppery flavor, or just can't stand it, radishes signal that the gardening season has begun in earnest. And that makes the hard work of the past few weekends worth it.

Warming Up With a Cold Frame

For this being a blog about farming, we haven't actually done much farming yet on our urban homestead. Part of that is just the unfortunate timing of finding our dream house/lot at the end of fall. We hurried to put in a garlic bed, but since then we've just been waiting and planning. Well, this "false spring" weather we've been having finally kicked our butts into action. So this weekend we built our first cold frame.

Folk wisdom in Iowa holds that you plant your cold-hardy crops a few weeks before the last frost, typically sometime in April. That felt like way too long to wait, but luckily there are ways to extend the growing season. We already knew about some of the more complicated ones, like greenhouses and high tunnels, but only recently discovered how easily we could build a similar structure for our raised beds.

A cold frame works on the same principles as a greenhouse; it shelters the plants and uses clear panels to let in sunlight and trap heat. In this sense it truly is solar powered - you don't need to add any external heat source to see a double-digit temperature increase inside the box. Combined with our recently obtained $5 windowpanes from the ReStore, this project was just too tempting to resist!

We started by building a wooden box. We've already done this several times with our raised garden beds. But this one needed to have a slight angle to it. Cold frames are designed to face South to capture as much sunlight as possible, so the Southerly side is about 4 inches shorter than the North. We cut the front and back to length, then made a long diagonal cut along the sides to taper from 4 to 8 inches in height. Since our three windows wouldn't cover our desired 4x8 raised bed, we also cut a few boards to fill in the empty spaces. All laid out, it looked like this:

We used a few screws in each corner to build our perimeter. As-is, the angle of the sides doesn't match up with the vertical boards of the front and back very well, so our windows wouldn't have a good snug fit. The best way to have the windows sit flush is to build the perimeter on a flat surface as we did here, then flip it over so the angles match perfectly. For more on this, and on cold frames in general, check out the very informative Four-Season Harvest by Eliot Coleman. We followed his plans almost exactly here, and are thrilled with our results.

The spacers we used aren't structural, so we just tacked them in with a few nails at each end. We needed them because we built the cold frame to match our "standard" raised bed size, even though we didn't have eight feet of windows. We had enough glass to cover most of the cold frame, so we knew the wooden spacers wouldn't have too much of a shading effect. As the sun travels across the sky, these small shadows will be cast on different parts of the bed, so there should be plenty of light for all the plants.

From here it was simple to place the cold frame on top of one of our garden beds, and insert the windowpanes. The cold frame isn't attached to the bed, so we'll be able to move it around the garden to whichever area needs extra heat. Early on, that means we can start spinach and radishes a few weeks ahead of schedule. Once they're established, we can move the frame to get a jump start on tomatoes and peppers. Then in the fall, we can repeat with greens or move on to root vegetables. It should be useful virtually the whole season long!

We put in the cold frame this afternoon, and a few short hours later it was already 15 degrees warmer inside the frame than it was outside. Our particular cold frame might need a few tweaks to really amp that up. At the moment it overhangs the front and back of the garden bed, just because of the height of the windows. That's a route for warm air to escape, so we'll probably try to add some boards to close the gaps. The cold frame should make a big difference in our garden, and it only took us about a day to build. Now if we can find more inexpensive windows, we might just need to build a few more of these!

Reuse, Recycle, ReStore

We moved into our new house about 4 months ago, and little by little we're figuring out just where everything will go and how we'll use each room.  But one area of the house currently has a purpose that is still entirely temporary. For the past several weeks, the basement has been a chicken coop construction zone, complete with sawdust, power tools, and stacks of repurposed lumber.

Neither of us can claim to have much experience with carpentry, but as we are constantly telling ourselves, "I don't think the chickens will care." So maybe each wall won't be perfectly straight because some of the old playset boards are a little warped or cracked, but they can still be useful. And just because we didn't want a backyard playset, doesn't mean that all of the boards are ready for the landfill.

With that in mind, we decided to check out the Greater Des Moines Habitat for Humanity's ReStore a couple of weeks ago.  The ReStore is stocked with a random collection of building materials that have been donated to Habitat for Humanity. When they recieve these donations, they first try to put them to use in the homes that they build. But sometimes they get donations that aren't quite what they need, and those items end up at the ReStore. The ReStore sells to the public, and uses the money to help support Habitat for Humanity's efforts to provide homes to people in need. There are ReStore outlets located in many major cities throughout the United States and Canada.

Walking into the ReStore is like entering a hardware store crossed with a flea market. Everything's organized, but since the donations are so random, inventory totally varies over time. One week there might be pallets full of ceramic tiles and landscaping blocks; another visit might yield a glut of bathtubs. It's a bit of an adventure to see what might be in stock on any given day. Some of the items at the ReStore are salvaged from a previous home, and just waiting for someone to find a new purpose for them. But they also have lots of new materials, so if you have a project at your home, it's worth stopping by to browse around.  You never know what you might find.

We're trying to build the chicken coop inexpensively, and as we mentioned while building our compost bin, we like to find the worth in "worthless" things. We spent quite a bit of time strolling up and down the aisles, back and forth across the store. We didn't know exactly what we hoped to find, but a couple of interesting items made their way home with us.

When Stacia drew pictures of the chicken coop, she included a crossbuck style door, just to add a little country charm to the design. She wasn't really thinking that concept would come to life exactly as drawn, but as fate would have it, we stumbled upon the perfect door hiding in a stack of perfectly ordinary doors. It's not the prettiest color, but it's structurally solid, and cost us just twenty-five dollars.  With a fresh coat of paint it'll grace the front of our coop quite nicely.

And while we initially wanted to find windows for the coop, we happened upon three like the one pictured that will have a rather different destination. Coop windows need to slide open for ventilation, but once we saw the big, plain wood-framed windows with no screens, we knew they had to go into our cold frame. We'll certainly talk more about cold frames as we work on building ours, but in short they're mini-greenhouses used to extend the growing season. These simple panes are perfect for a cold frame, and they were only five bucks a pop.

We didn't find quite the right windows for the chicken coop that day, but with new donations coming in all the time, we'll be sure to stop by again. Maybe another time we'll find just the right windows to complete our chicken coop project.  Or maybe we'll stumble upon the raw materials (and inspiration) to build something else entirely. Whatever building supplies you might be looking for, a trip to the ReStore is a treasure hunt that's definitely worth checking out.

The Birds

Last fall while we were house hunting, we told our Realtor all about our desire for a big backyard with lots of sunny space for a garden.  But there was one other thing that we were silently considering as we studied each backyard.  We sometimes spoke about it vaguely; in a sort of "code" that only we could understand.  Because you see, everyone can somewhat understand the desire for a garden, but we were making plans for something a bit more unconventional.  In an effort to seem reasonably sane in the company of our Realtor, we opted not to mention it.  Then one day as we were scrutinizing a relatively small backyard, Greg had no choice but to question, "Where would we put the birds?"

Ah yes, the birds.  Because no urban farm would be complete without a little livestock, we will be adding some backyard chickens this spring.  Our Realtor was surprised to hear that it was even legal to keep chickens in an urban backyard.  Well, fortunately for us, Des Moines is a very progressive city when it comes to backyard chicken-keeping.  We even chose to limit our house search to the city limits of Des Moines rather than any of the less chicken-friendly suburbs.

So now that you know that you can keep chickens in some cities (check your municipal code to find out), let's discuss why we want to keep backyard chickens.  The simple answer is: EGGS!  Eggs are a fantastic source of protein and a productive hen will lay an egg almost every day. Of course, you can buy eggs at the grocery store, but the commercial egg industry has serious problems with salmonella outbreaks, not to mention the poor living conditions and downright cruel treatment of the chickens. So why not raise your own?

Besides, chickens don’t need much more care than a typical housepet. They just need shelter, food, and water. The shelter is actually a work in progress already! Stacia has been spending time in the basement taking the salvaged pieces of the backyard playset and assembling them into small sections of the future chicken coop. They will eventually come together to make something like this:

There will be pictures of the real thing eventually, but for right now, it’s mostly just a concept. We’ve got a few months before we’ll need it anyway. Our current plan is to buy the baby chicks in mid-March, and keep them indoors for their first 5 to 6 weeks. Baby chicks need to be kept very warm until they grow their adult feathers. Then in early May they’ll move into their permanent home in the backyard. We’ll post plenty of updates here on the blog, so be sure to watch this space!

Sidenote: If backyard chicken-keeping isn’t an option for you, consider getting your eggs at a Farmer's Market. Or you might even be able to find a grocery store that sells eggs from small, local farmers. If you’re in the Des Moines area, we’ve seen local eggs at Gateway Market, Campbell’s Nutrition, and New City Market. (If you know of others, feel free to add them in the comments section.) We’d love to see people support farmers that care about the welfare of their animals and provide people with safe, fresh, healthy food!

One Man's Trash...

The day that we moved our belongings out of our suburban condominium and into our new house, we were fortunate to have help from Stacia’s Mom.  She traveled down to Des Moines from the Minneapolis area and brought along a trailer to haul our bigger items across Des Moines.  We hauled all the furniture you'd figure we would have in a condo, plus a few other things that you might not expect.

Among the rest of our furniture, we loaded up a stack of four used shipping pallets.  These pallets had been collected from beside a dumpster, where they were likely bound for a landfill.  But we spotted them, and saw a new purpose in their future.  Stacia’s Mom didn’t even have to ask about the shipping pallets before we explained that they were to become our new compost bin.

Some parents might still be a bit confused after that explanation, but not ours. Both our families have had compost bins in their gardens since we were young, and they're definitely into the idea of creative recycling.  On top of that, Stacia's Mom is known for having plenty of “brilliantly crazy ideas” of her own.  If we had a plan to take something useless and create something of value, she was on board.

Just a few short days after our move-in we tackled the construction.  It was a pretty simple project, perfect for our level of woodworking skill.  We took our four shipping pallets (all approximately the same size), then added four L-shaped brackets, two hinges, a gate latch, and a caster.  We placed three of the pallets in a U-shape and used the brackets to hold them together.  The fourth pallet would serve as our gate, so we raised that a few inches off the ground to prevent it from dragging and attached it to one side of the U with our hinges.  We added the gate latch to the other side so that we could close it up.  The bin wasn’t quite rigid enough to hold the gate up, so we added a caster under the end of the pallet with the latch to stop it from sagging.  And here’s what we had created:

It had everything we needed in a compost bin.  It allowed us to contain a pile of decomposing material, provided needed air flow between the slats, and gave us an easy access through the "gate" to allow us to turn the pile.  We had just one problem; it was pretty ugly.  Go figure that a bunch of old shipping pallets don't exactly look like they came out of Better Homes and Gardens. So in an attempt to keep it from looking like something we snatched from a dumpster, we added a coat of paint.  And we were finished!

The color is just a bit more tropical pastel than we were expecting, but it lends a little brightness to the garden anyway. Now we’ll just fill it up with organic stuff and if all goes well, we’ll have rich compost to use in our garden next year.  It seems fitting to be turning what's essentially trash into a really useful material inside a bin that itself was saved from the landfill. We’ll keep you posted to see how it goes!