Cucumber Tipi - Part 3

In spring, I covered the tipi with plastic to protect the cucumber sprouts from the cold and the wind -- and the marmots. I should have done it sooner, before a bunch of the sprouts got eaten... there is always more protection to install than I can keep up with.

The shelter really came in handy when Fawn and I got caught in a downpour! 

 

It was raining cats and dogs, but we were cozy with the cucumbers. 

 Above is the one start that I grew inside the house this year, a much-needed backup plan for my direct seed experiment (below). 

The direct seeding was a feasible trial in terms of temperature and timing, but a drawback I hadn't considered was vulnerability to wildlife. Indoor starts have an advantage in that department, being away from marmots during their most tender stage.

A great place to ride out the storm!

The spiral is the heavy gauge trellis wire I installed, 

featured in Cucumber Tipi Part 2.

When my sprouts got eaten (before the plastic went up), I wondered if all this preparation would result in a live tipi after all. Then I experienced another serendipitous provision: my friend Harris said that he had some extra Armenian cucumber starts -- ones he did not need! He offered them to me, and I felt like the luckiest garden lady around, driving home that day with those green beauties at my side. Above, you can see them freshly planted in the ground.

While planting the new starts, I noticed a plethora of earthworms in every shovel full. In a garden that had absolutely no worms in the beginning, it has been really fun to see them proliferate. They particularly liked the alpaca manure I laid down on the tipi floor, under the cardboard, in Cucumber Tipi Part 1. There is nothing like manure and cardboard to make earthworms happy. 

These starts made my heart soar -- a second chance!

When we entered a record-breaking heatwave at the end of June, I knew the plastic would have to go. Walking into the tipi was like walking into an oven.

Free!

I pulled the plastic back, and as much as I wanted to leave it open, I didn't want to lose my second round of plants. I put sheer fabric up to make the plants less obvious to marmots passing by.  (left two photos: July 2nd; right: July 19th)

 

Above right: Fawn and her friends, looking for cucumbers on July 16th.

From flowers to food...

At last our favorite garden snack begins to form!

It's a dream come true. A cucumber tipi that you can enter to escape the sun's heat, and to munch on the crispy cool goodness of summer's bounty.

Alderwood Archeology

The Alderwood Patch has come a long way from its days as a garbage pit, the way we found it when we bought the property.

Not only has the garbage been removed in a dump truck, and hugelkultur built up underground, but this year, a favorite childhood plant of mine has volunteered, bringing a sure sign of a microclimate shift! Scouring rush (Equisetum hyemale), a wetland indicator plant that sometimes grows outside of wetlands, popped up in the Alderwood Patch this spring, like a miracle in dusty sagebrush/Ponderosa Pine country. So how are things going underground, helping to alter the balances of moisture and temperature?

In March, I decided to rebuild the raspberry trellises as they were not tall enough. I made the circle bigger and as a side benefit, began some hugel-archeology with the post hole digger.

When I hit wood, at first I thought that was as far as I could dig. Then I decided to use the breaker bar (spud bar) to see if the wood had decomposed enough to dig through.

Indeed, I was able to put the post hole right through the hugel wood.

This is the condition of the alder wood in March 2015, after being in the ground since August 2013 (one and a half years). 

3/22/2015

The Alderwood Patch with its new trellis posts

A couple months later...

5/25/2015

The raspberry blossoms attracted a wide variety of pollinators this spring. 

This might be a Cuckoo bee from the genus Nomada.

The raspberries have been alive with many kinds of bees.

My favorite: the bumblebees!

Fawn says that even the green leaves smell like raspberries.

At last they start to ripen...

...and how fitting that the wildlife got the first one! 

It seems there may be enough to go around this year, though. :-)

Frames for Food

As the yellow-bellied marmots seek more and more food, 

I build more and more cages. 

All shapes and sizes ~ this time of year is a framing free-for-all!

This is the first above-ground frame to grace my garden, and it is featured in the Vegetable Jail post. Lee Johnson helped me build it using old 2x6's from behind our shop. A woman from Omak was giving away old leather belts, so I tried using one for a latch on each corner to keep it shut. It is a good concept, but the old leather was already brittle and they have started ripping. It would be good to have thicker, more supple leather.

Here Fawn is harvesting from this same frame. It was planted on Valentine's Day and has been serving us well! Just a few old 2x6's can protect enough lettuce to keep our family eating salads every day. 

This design is tops for simplicity: 

1. Nail some 2x6's into a rectangle. 

2. Make a lid frame to match, using 1x2's or 2x2's, or 2x4's. 

3. Tack on hardware cloth or chicken wire. 

4. Done. 

(Hinges, latches, and plastic or fabric are optional)

This I call, "Bill's garden bed." My husband's lifelong friend, Bill, was helping me add aged manure to this bed on the day he died at our home unexpectedly, earlier this spring. He also helped me try to remove a piece of rebar that I had pounded in (last year, to support a different marmot cage that came before I learned to frame with wood). I will always remember working this soil with Bill, and the gezellig of working together that day. I will honor his memory by sharing my produce with others in the way that he was generous with us.

This is Bill's garden bed with the lids on, and after the plants have had a chance to grow.

This is how the angled lids open. I love hinges!

This large frame was featured in the Vegetable Jail post. 

I have started adding extensions as the plants get taller.

Here's how it looks from the other side. Since this photo was taken, the carrots and onions have topped out of the extension too!

This design is tops for its ability to grow taller plants...

...and the curved roof for shedding rains when plastic is laid on top. 

It is more like a mini-greenhouse than any of the other designs.

Here Fawn is picking Red Orach, a wonderfully purple salad fixing! The front panel is compression fit into the frame, and the lid lifts off.

When I can't get my hands on wide or straight enough boards, then I cobble together miscellaneous pieces to create the dimensions I need. This is my green bean bed. One side is made from two pieces of slabwood.

The other side is made from several different pieces, all nailed together to generate the needed height and length.

It turned out better than I expected, given the mish-mash of pieces. I love making "something from nothing," a concept we practiced at B.X. Elementary school in our "Extra Enrichment" classes with Mrs. Barling. It means you take things that would normally be discarded as useless, and make something that you are proud of.

Deb visited my garden today and took this photo. It's fun to have garden visitors! 

(Thanks for taking this photo, Deb.)

The next frames on the docket are for the strawberry beds to keep the chipmunks off. The bonus with all of these cages is that they also function as cold frames, and will extend the growing season in both directions. So, I don't mind making the effort and learning some new skills in the process. We are definitely eating more veggies as a result.

Cucumber Tipi - Part 2

In the Cucumber Tipi Part 1 post, you saw a patch of weedy orchard grass turned into a central structure in the Wood for Food garden. We now have a tipi for growing veggies vertically out of the first underground aspen hugelkultur bed.

Just for fun, this photo shows me standing in 2012 about where the tipi is now! The tipi would be on my shoulders, though. (The fence post in the above picture is the same post you see in the picture below, taken from a different direction.)

With the tipi erected, it needed something for the plants to hold onto. I love using old materials instead of buying new things that require resources to be extracted from the earth. I contacted the owners of a local gem, the Esther Bricques Winery, to find out how they source their trellis wire. They happened to have some wire that was ready to be re-purposed, and I experienced again the main lesson this garden has taught me: envision having what's needed, knowing that it will surface, and it will. Thank you so much, Linda and Steve Colvin, for helping make this project happen!

Around and around and around I went with the wire. It started raining but I was determined to finish. Here the circular trellis wire is attached, looking up from inside the tipi. This is a much heavier gauge wire than I've worked with before, and I really like the structural integrity that it added to the tipi.

The wire is attached with small fencing staples. 

I left a gap between two of the poles for the door. 

And now, we have cucumber sprouts! 

We can't wait to see the plants grow, sit in the shade of their leaves, 

and taste the crisp, sweet goodness of an Armenian cucumber straight off the vine.

*          *          *

Meanwhile, back in the "early sowing outdoors" beds, things are coming right along! This is our first time eating carrots from the garden at the beginning of June.

 Fresh carrots straight out of the soil taste like, "life is good."

"I like to eat like a rainbow!"