Summer 2021

July

Birthday

As you may know July is my birthday month. This year was my 70th. Carolyn pitched in and helped me buy a brand new dump trailer. This will make unloading wood chips, gravel, sand, topsoil, etc. much easier than by hand. I also put new tires on my little garden trailer.

An unexpected birthday present came in the mail - a gift certificate to my favorite store, Harbor Freight Tools. Thank you Sara Smith! 🙂

Strange "Crops"

Many mushrooms pop up and flourish during the month of July. Our favorite is the Black Trumpet. They taste delicious. The only drawback is that they turn whatever they're cooked with a dark color. Also this month I noticed we had some paw paws on our scrawny little paw paw tree. Unfortunately the deer or something else got every one of them before they had a chance to ripen. Last but not least was broccoli! We've never been able to grow broccoli before but for some reason this year we succeeded.

Visitors

This month we had visitors! Sara came down with her girls for a few days. M_ie and the gang had great fun cooking and making tie-dyed t-shirts etc. A good time was had by all :-) We wish they would come more often.

August

Dumping Ground

I got wooden sides built for my dump trailer so it could hold a good load of wood chips and I made my first delivery to the garden. That was an easy chore to empty all those chips -- just push a button!

Travel

Carolyn's family from Italy came to visit so she rented a large house in Virginia where the whole bunch gathered for a family reunion including Carolyn's 101-year-old  mother. Of course, despite having been vaccinated against it, we took the COVID test to make sure we weren't packing the virus along.

First Big Harvest

When we got back from Virginia the garden had been busy at work the whole time. We gathered up our first big harvest and then the canning began. 🙂

Art Studio

Carolyn hired Nathan and his crew to convert the screen porch into an art studio. This is a project that was started months earlier but had to wait for the windows to be custom manufactured. At the same time we had Nathan put a little shed roof over the front porch. It really improves the look of the house and protects the front door.

September

Not much exciting happened this month. The biggest thing for me was getting tracker back after a very long wait to get his brakes and clutch adjusted. The mechanic is very good and thus very busy.

That's not to say we weren't busy harvesting more fruits of our labors and canning and preserving them for future use. Check out my bite-size watermelon 🙂

Feeding the Worms

I guess you've all been wondering where we've been the past two months. Well, right here in the woods. As I mentioned in the last post I had started work on a vermicomposting flush toilet. It is now complete. The following pictures will summarize the process but generally speaking this is what had to be done:

1. Remove the old toilet
2. Finish the tile floor
   The former toilet was a built-in bench seat that was set diagonally in the room, The tile did not go under it. Fortunately we had just enough whole pieces and scraps left over to replace the diagonally cut tiles.
3. Build the enclosure for the worm tank
   This was necessary for two reasons; to ensure good slope in the sewer line from the house and to help maintain a more constant temperature for the worms. Just don't do what I did and try to destroy your work while back-filling 😢
4. Run the sewer line
5. Prepare the worm tank
   This entailed making four aeration stacks to ensure plenty of oxygen in the system. These stacks consist of 3" PVC with about 20 one inch holes drilled in each then wrapped in fiberglass window screen. The tank itself is a 1000 liter IBC - a big polyethylene container with a 2 inch drain valve in the bottom. A layer of fist size stones was laid in the bottom of the tank then covered with several inches of gravel on top of which was another layer of fiberglass window screen. Finally the tank was filled with aged wood chips. On top was placed a layer of green kitchen waste (vegetable scraps) to give the worms something to munch on until the system was inaugurated.
6. Run the drain line
   The drain line carries the liquid that has filtered through the bed of wood chips and gravel out to the greenfilter.
7. Prepare the greenfilter
   Also called the "soakaway", this element of the system handles the bulk of the flush water. It is a shallow pit (mine is about 3x5 feet and about 18 inches deep. It is also filled with wood chips. The drain line empties into this pit and is covered by about 4 - 6 inches of wood chips.  Natural soil bacteria in the first few inches of earth consume the excess nitrogen and generally clean the effluent.
8. Run waterline
9. Install new flush toilet
10. Build roof over worm tank for shade

The new system has been in operation for almost 2 weeks now. The worms seem happy and there are no foul odors coming from the tank. So far so good.

Of course, that is not the only thing going on around here. Besides tending the garden - tying, spraying, pruning, weeding - we've had to deal with three broken vehicles. First my Trailblazer started running very rough and about the same time my little tractor had a clutch failure. And, just because bad things seem to come in threes, my riding mower had a catastrophic blade failure. I was able to fix both the mower and my car but the tractor was taken to a mechanic over in Rainsville.

During the storm that cut across Alabama on Juneteenth, I lost a couple of trees. Sadly they were both red oaks. One I was expecting to loose relatively soon to disease. When it went, it took another healthy one with it. Such is life.  Now I have other things to do - make wood chips, split firewood, and saw lumber. Yay!

Since the middle of May, we have sighted six snakes around the house, shop, and garden. As good luck would have it, they have all been the kind you want hanging around - rat snakes and king snakes mostly plus one milk snake. These reptilian friends not only keep rodents in check, they are very territorial and do not tolerate venomous snakes. 

Well, that's about it.  If you have any questions or comments please email me. We'd love to hear from you.

Russ - rustygrey@gmail.com

Carolyn - csmith7173@gmail.com

Blossoms Galore and Garden Expansion

I am always impressed by how beautiful the wild azaleas are. We have them in white and pink and combinations thereof.

The azaleas and the dogwoods really catch your attention but the tiny wild flowers at your feet are just as pretty. Here we have Bird's Foot Violet, Yellow Violet, Dwarf Iris, and Trillium.  This year, there was more Trillium than I have ever noticed before.

Carolyn made this lovely Easter table decoration with an arrangement of Bluets and moss along with her hand-painted eggs.

The garden space enclosure is three times the size of last year's.  Let me tell you that driving T-posts is not among my favorite things to do.  Still, I managed to get it done in just a few days. I explained the 3D deer fence in the March 2020 post Beware the Ides of March.

The garden really had to be larger to accommodate the larger number of varieties we wanted to try this year.  Among the new crops are: Cabbage, Broccoli, Sweet Peas, Winter Squash, Red Onion, Tomatillo - just to name a few.

I don't have pictures to include here but we are attempting to root Redbud, Coosa Dogwood, and Yates Apple trees.

As hinted in the previous post, I have actually begun work on what will become a new flush toilet system. Here is where the "septic tank" will be located.  This will not be a traditional septic system.  Instead of relying on anaerobic bacteria to break down solids, I will employ thousands of red wiggler worms to do this in an aerobic environment. Liquid will rapidly filter through a few hundred pounds of wood chips and exit the tank into a "greenfilter" bed  filled with nitrogen-loving plants.  You can read all about this system here: http://www.vermicompostingtoilets.net/

Next step is to lay cinder block on the concrete pad I just poured then back fill three sides leaving an access point for maintenance on the downhill side.