Strawberries

This is way too good to be something I built!

I have been wanting to plant strawberries for a while. I LOVE fresh strawberries - not including the very tasteless and sour ones you buy at the grocery store. While searching for a place to buy strawberry plugs, I saw this really cool planting tower here at this link. This seemed like a great way to plant 50 or so plants and save some space.

I thought to myself, "I can make that! It's only a strawberry tower... how hard can it be?" You'll see that "how hard can it be?" question asked often around the Red Clay Farm. Usually, I find out it's a little harder than I expected.

So I just bought a bunch of wood, garden soil and screws and I am ready to start creating.  I'll keep you informed on my progress (and how hard it really was).

The Chickens are Here!

The chickens we ordered back in October are finally here! I got a call from Monica at the Post Office at 6 am today - it sounded like she was in the hatchery. She told me I should come and get them as soon as I can. Wouldn't you know they would come on one of the coldest days, wettest days we've had all year!

When I got to the post office, all I could hear were chicks. I was amazed that my 10 chickens would make that much noise! Turns out, they didn't. My 10 chicks were barely peeping. It was the other 1500 going to another farm that were making all the noise.

I got my chicks home and into the plastic tub brooder I set up in the dining room (The wife is thrilled!) They were well packaged in a small cardboard box with a thick coconut coir liner with a heating pad underneath. Meyer Hatchery did a great job getting them to me alive and exactly on time! The rest is up to me, I guess...

Our First Compost

This is not our compost but looks very similar

Almost a year after I made our big compost corral, we finally got some good compost from it. I dug out about a cubic yard of deep, dark compost and put it in our garden today.

It was a mix of manure from our horses, our kitchen scraps and a whole bunch of bad fruits and veggies from our local grocery store (Last fall I made a deal to make a daily pick-up of the store's bad produce for about a month). The result was a deep dark compost that looked like black dirt. It had hundreds of volunteer worms in it and a few very juicy grubs. I picked all the grubs I saw out of the compost and let the worms make the short trip to the garden where I hope they'll stay.

We got enough compost out of the bin to put a 3" layer across a 4'x12' area. I didn't mix it in to the dirt, but just left in sitting on top, and planted our fall lettuce/spinach crop right in the compost.  As I think about it, that may not have been a good call. I probably should have mixed the compost into the soil a little, but now the seeds are down and I hate to waste them. We'll see what happens...

New Blood for the Herd!

Moe and Curly a few days before joining the Red Clay Farm staff

It's hard to grow the herd when it's just a pack of girls. Goats are not like the dinosaurs of Jurassic Park. We made the decision to take our original buck to the sale last Dec because we were having a hard time keeping him separate from his daughters. I have been looking for a good boy since I returned from overseas. The problem was every pygmy buck I found was too young. Of course, they would have matured in the time it took me to find one in the age range I was looking for.

I finally found a couple bucks in the Saluda, SC area so after some email conversations with the self-proclaimed "Goat Lady," I drove the 85 miles west to pick them up.

When I finally found the place, way out in the middle of nowhere, I met the goat lady. She was very passionate about her goats and I learned a lot from her as she prepped the boys (two brothers from the same birth) to make the trip back to the Red Clay Farm.

When I got the boys back and released them into the pasture they were completely ignored by the girls and they are keeping their distance from the girls. I wonder how long this will last?

Motivation for Sustainability

Diagram from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow's_hierarchy_of_needs

So, what does a picture of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs have to do with a sustainable living blog? As it turns out, quite a lot.

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs theory attempts to explain human motivation psychology. Maslow's theory suggests that people must meet the most basic level of needs (found at the bottom level of the pyramid) before they will focus motivation on the secondary or higher level needs (higher levels of the pyramid). As an example, most people will ensure they have food water and shelter before they worry about their own security, and before they reach out to become part of the community, they will likely focus on immediate security needs. This continues until, hopefully, a person reaches the top level of the pyramid.

While Maslow’s  model may not be perfect, it explains a lot. The ability to care about sustainable living requires that people be somewhere above the bottom two rungs of the pyramid. If a person is starving, why would he care if his actions are destroying the environment? All he is concerned with is meeting his most basic needs of having enough food and water for himself and his family. If he has not met his basic security needs, I’m sure we won’t find him setting up a compost pile or starting a recycling program. He has better things about which to worry.

I guess what I am saying is until we can get people to a particular level of basic needs, safety and security, we are never going to get everybody rowing in the same direction toward a sustainable future. In addition to getting people to a point where they care about sustainable living, there is also a HUGE education requirement. People need to know and understand the effects of their lifestyle upon the environment, and have alternatives that are not so burdensome that they are overlooked.

It’s a huge undertaking. I’m not sure how we get to a sustainable future from here. Until we come up with a plan, I’ll keep plugging along here.

Worm Farming

For years, I have wanted to do a vermiculture project - grow worms to eat our kitchen waste. I attempted a worming experiment once in Oklahoma that did not end well for the poor worms. They got too hot and the box I made did not get enough air, nor did it drain well and most of the worms perished. We held a funeral for them in the back yard garden.

Last year for Christmas, Mrs Red Clay Farmer bought me a Worm Factory 360. Because of all the traveling I was doing this year, I was not able to start it until this fall. This gave me lots of time to do some research on the proper care and feeding of worms.

I will report on my worm project in later posts. In the meantime, here are a few links to the most helpful sites I found:

http://www.wormfarmingsecrets.com/ - Duncan Carver does a great little email newsletter
http://www.rodaleinstitute.org/200309/Connettts.com/ - Interesting article about a commercial grower
http://www.bae.ncsu.edu/topic/vermicomposting/vermiculture/nc.html - NC State University Links
http://www.bae.ncsu.edu/topic/vermicomposting/index.html - NC State University Links

And if I can find it again, NCSU had a great PDF file about vermiculture. Once I locate it I will post a link here.

The Red Clay Farmer

Weekend Project - Build a Composter

Our Landscaping timber composter at work.

Supplies:
27 - 8 ft landscaping timbers
6 - 4ft long x 1/2 inch rebar
1 Roll landscaping fabric and galvanized roofing nails (optional)
Total price in Oct 11 - $97.00

Tools:
Drill
5/8 spade drill bit
Hammer
Tape Measure
Saw (to cut timbers in half)

1. Cut 11 of the landscaping timbers in half, making 22 - 4 ft long pieces.

2. Measure 2" from the end of each of these timbers and mare in the center of the timber's width.

3. Using a 5/8" wood spade drill bit, drill half-way through the timber. Do this for three half-length timbers. These will be the base of the composter. Set them to the side.

4. Mark the remaining timbers for drilling. Short timbers should be marked and drilled 2" inches from the end and centered from side to side. Long timbers should be marked and drilled similarly on the ends, but will also need a hole drilled in the middle for the dividing wall.

5. Lay out your three base timbers and place the rebar in the holes drilled half-way through. (not required, but consider placing on top of bricks or cinder blocks so you can get to the compost from the bottom of the composter. This will allow you room to shovel the compost from the bottom of the bin)

6. Place a long timber across the back, then one across the front. Use a hammer to knock the timbers down the rebar if necessary.

7. Check to make sure the base of the structure is square.

8. Continue to add pieces, log cabin-style, until complete.

9. (Optional) Cut lengths of landscaping cloth so they will reach from the top of the timbers to the bottom. Secure in place with galvanized roofing nails. (this is an after thought to my construction. The landscaping fabric will allow air to pass through, but will keep the compost from coming out from between the timbers.

Since you'll be drilling a lot of holes in the same place on each timber, consider making a jig that guide your drilling placement and keep it uniform. Here are some pictures of the simple jig I built for the project.

This is my end hole jig. I would slip this over the end of the timber and make sure the ends of both the timber and the jig were flush, then I'd drill.

This is the jig for the middle holes. I marked each long time at the 4' midway point, then placed the jig on the side of the timber to locate the hole.

Building a Composter

There are a few things to take into consideration when deciding what type of composter to build or buy.

- How much effort are you going to put into composting?
- What, and how much do you plan to compost?
- How much money do you want to spend?

There are composters for every style, compost volume and price range.

With two horses and a garden, as well as our kitchen vegetable scraps, we planned for a fairly large volume of compost - the horses being the biggest producers of waste. We really like to two-bay tumbler-style compost bins but the ones that are big enough are out of our price range. Instead, we opted to build our own. For less than the cost of a small tumbler composter, we built a two-bay, 8X4 composter out of landscaping timbers and rebar.

After doing some research, we settled on a composter in the style of the Compost Corral featured at this link (and in the picture above). We made just a few small alterations to the basic construction. First, we made it taller, using 4ft rebar instead of the 2 ft rebar recommended. Second, rather than making a huge, 8x8 compost pile, we cut some of the landscaping timbers in half and made it 4x8. Last, rather than one big 4x8 rectangle, we placed a dividing wall in the middle to make to 4x4 bins. This way, once one side is full, we can let it "cook" while we continue to add to the other pile.

Tune in to the next blog to see to details on how to build it and how it turned out.

The Red Clay Farmers

Which Composter?

We started composting sometime around 2000. Unfortunately, we usually didn't stay in one place long enough to take advantage of the finished compost. When we first started, our compost pile was just that - a pile of mostly grass clippings behind the back fence. Occasionally we would throw our vegetable kitchen scraps in the pile Later, in 2004, we graduated to a plastic bin-style composter. I was always amazed at how quickly the grass would decompose in a week's time!

Well, our plastic bin-style composter was on it's last legs after two moves and being hit a few times by the riding mower. It was held together with copper wire and duct tape and looked pretty sad out in the back yard. We have been looking for a replacement for a while but didn't want to break the bank.

There are many styles of composters. They come in many shapes and price levels. I had been coveting a Joraform JK400. The JK400 is a top-of the line, tumbler-style composter that sports insulated walls in order to maintain heat. Unfortunately, a top of the line composter comes with a top of the line price and at this point in our lives, it was neither practical, nor affordable, to buy one. I didn't like the plastic, flimsy bin composters we found at the local Lowes, and the tumbler-style composters we found were all too small for our purposes. Since nothing was really meeting our needs, we decided to make our own... I mean, it's only composting. How hard can it be?

We will keep you up to date on our construction.

Now that I've Got a Blog, What Do With It?

A confession: I am a closet tree hugger.

After 23 years in the Army, I am finally coming out! I hate crowded, dirty places. Since our planet is about to top the 7 billion human mark any day (if it has not done so already), it seems there's not much I can do about the crowded part except learn to live with it.

What I CAN do is learn to live sustainably and reduce my impact on this world as much as I can. It's something we ALL can do with just a little effort. My goal with the blog is to share my quest with the World in the hope that I can be an example to others.

I am certainly not a purist. We are not going to do everything correctly, or in the most Earth-friendly manner. Let's face it. As a species, we humans are pretty selfish. If something is too hard to do, regardless of the benefits to ourselves and others, we're not going to do it. So, because of this we will be baby-stepping our way toward sustainable living in a way that is not too burdensome and may actually be fun.

I hope you will join us in our quest!

The Red Clay Farmers