Ending and Beginning

STILL haven’t turned on the furnace — just amazing. It’s not only because we’re putting up with a chillier house or that we’re being especially diligent, it’s also that the weather has been exceptionally mild. I’m still harvesting collards and kale from the garden, without doing anything to protect them. Kinda weird, but hard to complain….

I took a vacation day today since it was supposed to be a nice day and I’d have a chance to work outside. So I did the biochar thing (see above) and also finished connecting the two West beds into one nice big garden space by digging up sod. Corn and tomatoes will go there next year.

Also put 10 gallons of coffee grounds on top of part of the freshly-dug sod there, then a wheelbarrow of leaf compost on top of that. That’s a good way to add coffee grounds without having to dig a trench (which is hard to do where I’ve just turned over the sod). Too bad I’m almost out of leaf compost and the county composting site is closed until April. Maybe in the Spring I’ll hire someone with a dump truck to get the compost for me — sure would save a lot of time and effort.

Turning over sod for 2 or 3 hours is hard work, and I’m fantasizing about a rototiller. I’ll need something if we get much more land under cultivation. It’s hard for me to imagine maintaining a garden even one acre in size without power tools.

Also put 10 gallons of stabilized gasoline into storage today — NOT in the house or garage. I plan to change it once a year.

This entry was posted on 1 December 2009 at 10:00 am and is filed under Burning wood, Climate Change, Gardening, Heating. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.