Barrel Hoop #1

Barrel Hoop MicroFarm

Barrel Hoop Micro-Farm or Macro-Garden

This entry and others with the Barrel Hoop title will be a bit of a separate blog running parallel and within "reasonable Path".  "Barrel Hoop Micro Farm" is what I call the place we live.  When clearing the land we found a set of old rusty barrel hoops.  I put them on each of the gates as decor, and then realized that they were our 'logo'.  We are working to make it into as much of a farm as you can have on 8/10ths of an acre of sloped, rocky, clayey, land crawling with deer, chipmunk, squirrels, woodchucks, snakes, black bears and coyotes, to mention some of the wild life that want to share our harvest.
I'd like to use these entries to keep track of the practices and events that occur for us on the "farm". 

Right now the farm is just a plant based experiment, but we are trying to get some chickens going here for eggs.  I am in the process of building a coop from reclaimed wood and trying to decide the best place to situate them.

(78'f, passing clouds, humid)
Today, we finished putting in borders on the downhill side of two long garden beds, in the main plot.  Each bed is about 50 feet long and about 3 feet wide.  They are terraced and have walking paths between them of about 20 inches.  The wood for the borders is cedar decking reclaimed from my neighbors deck.  It has paint on one side and I put that side to the dirt facing uphill so that it might last a little longer.  the stakes that support the cedar are scrap from wooden pallets I get for free from a local lumber yard.

main plot 2010

The borders are to help reduce erosion from the steep slope.  After those were complete I was able to turn over the cover crop  of  Hairy Vetch, yellow peas, and alfalfa, (green manure from Johnny's Seeds Johnny's Selected Seeds – Superior Seeds & Gardening Tools  ) that has been growing there for about a month.  I mixed that in with buckets of compost.  Our soil is full of rocks (Rockland County, NY) and it also has a lot of clay.  It has been a will be a multiple year process to get the soil into really good condition. In a few weeks we can plant in those beds.

This planting will be later that it could have been by about 3 weeks.  I just didn't get it all together when I would like to have.  Other beds are already seeded and have a good amount of growth already.  A pepper plant already has blossoms


Downhill of the to beds I turned over today are about 10 "finger" beds that run uphill and down.  They are smaller, each about 3 by 5 feet.  Today, in the last finger bed, we put in the a few squash seedlings.  that completed the bed for this year.  It is the "3 sisters bed" with corn, pinto beans, and squash.

We also got squash put in a few other places on the farm.  We have to give a lot of thought to where we put all the plants but especially the ones that will vine out over the ground long distances.  Our space is challenging in many respects.

We have already gone thru our Asparagus crop for the season.  We enjoyed about 5 meals with them as appetizer or as a part of the main meal.  They are so sweet that we don't even season them, just steam for about 3 minutes and then eat!  The ones we get from the local farms I prefer to season with a little sea salt, cracked black pepper, and a hit of lemon juice.  Toss the ingredients and then eat!  Now we have the beautiful asparagus ferns to look at while waiting for the strawberries to come in.  They share two terraces with some lettuce and lemon sorrel,  and a few left over garlics and one chard.

I didn't get the rest of the corn put in.  The seedling sit in their trays in the low tunnel and will eventually be transplanted to the southern most beds, we call the "terraces", to grow next to some sunchokes, and probably some more beans.

Kitchen plot 2010, with low tunnel frames 

I will try to get some more pics up soon.