Jeanne, pouring footings for the new summer kitchen.
East half of the garden. It's come a long way in a month. Cabbages, summer and winter squash, raspberries, blackberries, horseradish, rhubarb, pumpkins, strawberries, asparagus and sea kale in this section.
Half of west garden. This section has corn, beans, one winter squash, parsnips, carrots, tomatoes, garlic, beets. The remaining part to the west has more corn, more tomatoes, kale, lettuce, spinach, cucumbers, melons, wax beans, green beans, lima beans, millet, oats (for oatstraw infusions), turnips and rutabegas, and outside the fence, more tomatoes, a grape, and along the top and bottom of the fence, peas and sunflowers. Above the garden, towards the camera, we have a few more beds with calendula, stinging nettle, comfrey, lavender, lots of basil, nasturtiums, yarrow, lemon balm, sage, oregano, thyme, and I’ve forgotten what else.
Here, west of the fenced garden, we experimented with seeding things in a portion of the field that had been tilled but not seeded by the hired custom farmer. Linc planted rye, oats, quinoa, three heritage varieties of corn, black tepary beans, field peas, fava beans. Some seeds he hand broadcast, others he planted with a stick or a thumb, others he raked a bit of soil over them, and most he got a thin layer of straw spread on top. This got sporadic water through the end of July, but not much at all after that, very little attention, no weeding. The field peas did great, a few corn plants came up a foot or so and stopped, a couple of the rye made seed heads, fava beans came up but didn’t produce seed. In other words, this field is hurting for fertility. We’re having a soil test done before next year’s planting season. The field below, which was seeded to dryland pasture mix and Ladak Alfalfa, did much better than we’d hoped. The seeding job was really irregular, so there were bare patches and green patches, but the alfalfa and grasses did pretty well, especially the alfalfa, which should help restore some fertility to the soil. We also had a great crop of wild sunflowers, primrose, prickly lettuce, bindweed and a wild mustard, all of which were appreciated by our goats whenever we let them out there (nearly every day).
On July 11th, Eggplant gave birth to her first kids, two incredibly cute little half Boer-half Nubian doelings. Here Jeanne is weighing one of them.
Full moon rising over Lamborn through the goat barn.
Phoebe, Eggplant and their kids, lounging by the barn.
Meanwhile, the summer kitchen has progressed with a peeled pole timber frame, a roof made of pallets and 2x4’s with recycled metal roofing, and an old cook stove for cooking summer meals on.
Eggplant turned out to be such a good mother that she wouldn’t leave her kids to graze in the field unless Jeanne offered to babysit for her. Jeanne would bring the kids up to the cabin so that she could work on things while she was playing foster goat Mom. The kids would explore for a few minutes and then curl up in a corner for a nap.
Our next project was to build a wood fired earthen (cob) oven. It took awhile to decide what to use for a base, wanting to get the oven itself up at waist level or higher, and not wanting to spend a lot of time mortaring rocks together or spending a bundle of cinder blocks. Our solution was to mortar one course of salvaged cinder blocks in a square, fill that with rocks, then put two layers of straw bales on top, covered with a thick layer of earthen plaster (which Jeanne is happily slathering on in this photo).
The finished cob oven base.
We now interrupt this cob oven photo series for an obligatory cute goat picture.
To insulate the oven firebrick floor (which can attain temperatures of over 800 F) from the strawbale base, we built a cob retaining ring and filled that with perlite.
The perlite got an earthen plaster cap, which is drying as Jeanne cooks a summer meal on the outdoor cook stove.
Next, we added the firebrick hearth, and discovered that we had to build a temporary support shelf to hold the front row of bricks up (later we replaced this wood shelf with cob). On top of the hearth, we put a cardboard form to use as temporary support for a mortared common brick arching doorway.
Our neighbor Zoe, and HDCSS intern Molly, came over to help Jeanne and I create the oven doorway, mortaring the bricks in place with an earthen mortar (probably should have used cement mortar in retrospect, but it seems to be holding up pretty well so far).
A second intern, Ben showed up to assist with the finishing touches to the doorway.
Followed by construction of a wet sand mound. The sand is sculpted to the exact shape and height you want for your oven, then covered with 4 to 6” of earthen cob, which is allowed to dry. Afterwards, the cardboard doorway form is removed and the sand is scooped out, leaving a completed oven.
Ben, Molly and Zoe applying the first layer of cob over the sand form.
Leaving the cob oven to dry for a few days, we’re back to gardening. We might actually get some heads of cabbage this year!
Things are really growing in the west garden.
And the zucchini and yellow squash are taking over the east garden.
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