Some time ago I wrote about starting a greenhouse project.  The floor was complete on April 24th…of last year.  Then things happened and life went on, and the greenhouse project was abandoned for a while.  But now, it’s complete!

North East corner of the Greenhouse

It’s sturdy as heck, and quite a bit taller than I needed, but I can hang things from the inside rafters and my husband won’t whack his head if he goes inside, which is nice.  We bought the roofing material at a greenhouse supply place in Aurora, which saved us tons of money compared with buying pre-sized panels from a horticulture place.  Seriously, we saved probably 50%, even if you factor in having to drive 45 miles one way instead of 25. And the place in Aurora even cut them to size for us, so there was literally no benefit to buying the pre-cut panels.  Very weird.  But now I remember why I don’t go to the horticulture place much!

Inside the greenhouse, shelves along the south wall.

The windows are salvage from an old mansion down on the riverfront in Vancouver.  My folks found them at a VFW rummage sale for a few bucks a piece, and bought something like 20 of them, with the idea of using them in their own house.  Well, they turned out not to be right for their purposes, so we got them.  They’re wood framed, double paned, but not “energy efficient” so they don’t keep the solar heat out, though they do keep the heat in the greenhouse nicely.

Greenhouse door, ajar. It opens out, of course.

The door is an old sliding glass door off our old house, which was replaced when we moved out because, well, frankly it sucked.   Since my parents own our old house, we get most of the cast offs, and they go into projects like this!  Todd used a piano hinge as a closure, and then crafted a handle for it out of a piece of wood.  Super cool.

The floor is also cast offs from our old house; the main portion is bricks that used to be the floor of our gazebo area, and the outer edge is cinder blocks that were part of some raised beds.   The inside shelves are partly salvaged lumber, partly new lumber, and strong enough for either of us to stand on.  Can’t imagine the plants will get THAT heavy!

Shelves along the north wall, and the east wall.

There’s adequate storage space under the shelves for all the pots I have hanging around, and for the implements and things that seem to pile up.  Hopefully this means I’ll be able to overwinter some of my more tender plants, like the pineapple sage, and maybe have some winter veggies this year!

We will be moving the quince tree which is just to the east of the greenhouse, and way too close.  We weren’t really thinking greenhouse when we put the tree there!  But we’ll wait until fall, after it goes dormant again, to dig it up and transplant it somewhere more convenient.   And eventually we’ll paint the greenhouse to match the house, but we’ll wait until we get the rabbit hutch and kitchen trailer done, so we can paint those and the chicken coop and everything all at once.

And at some point, we’ll be putting gutters on both the chicken coop and the greenhouse, and installing a couple more rain barrels so that I don’t have to go far to get to water for the plants, and so I won’t have to hook up to our crazy-expensive city water to do it.   And Todd has plans to build me a potting bench out under the west edge of the greenhouse, under an overhang and up against the arborvitae.   I think he’s afraid I’m going to get dirt on the floor of his new greenhouse…

Greenhouse floor.

Greenhouse, looking at the east end.

This guy’s been hanging out on the front porch for several days now.  Don’t know where he came from or why he’ s hanging out on the brick.  He’s alive, I checked.

Big herkin' bug.

I also looked him up with my fearsome Google skillz, and he is apparently a Ponderous Borer (Ergates spiculatus), a large pine borer beetle that lives on dead and dying trees.  Well okay then.  And that’s my finger for comparison, not my kid’s.   Big bug.

Since we had a hen go broody several months ago, we’ve been planning the expansion of the chicken coop. We started with five girls last year, and after acquiring three new girls from a neighbor and having 4 babies hatch from our broody hen’s clutch, we now have a total of 12 chickens. The coop that was more than adequate for 5 girls was just a little snug for 12, both in the “bedroom” and the outdoor run. Never fear, husband to the rescue!

First, he laid a new, dug-in foundation of cinderblocks to prevent any pests from digging into the coop easily. Given the hardness of our all-clay soil, I’d be surprised if anything could dig under the coop in one night even without the blocks in the way, but doesn’t hurt to be safe. Then we moved the entire coop, chickens and all, using a hand truck and a lot of heaving and cussing. Fortunately, we only had to slide it over by the length of the coop.

After the coop was moved, Todd built a new run for the outside. He left the original coop roofed over, and the new run has a roof made of sturdy galvanized chicken wire. It more than doubled the fenced-in run space the girls have. Since we leave them in the run more often than not, we wanted to be sure they had adequate space to get away from one another and roam, and a place for me to throw treats and entertainment (it’s amazing what an entire uprooted cauliflower plant does for the activity level of the girls!)

Then he started in on the “bedroom”. Our original design was nice, with the nest boxes and roosts enclosed up above an open area on one side of the coop. It left more floor space “outside” that way, but it had a couple of inherent flaws. First, the girls’ exit door into the run flipped up instead of to the side. Being short, that presented a problem to me, given that it was over halfway up from the floor and I sometimes had a hard time latching it open at the top. And since it was up high, we had to have a ramp in the coop for the girls to climb up to their “bedroom”, which took up space and presented a lovely platform for poo-collecting. However, the biggest problem was cleaning the inside area; in order to clean the floor of the roosting area, we had to flip open the entire back of the coop, remove the nest boxes and roosts, and shovel it out. Big disruption to the girls, and not quick or easy for the humans.

Human Access DoorThe door into the run/coop from the outside. The girls know I’m going to open it soon!

The new setup has less “outdoor” space, since the area under the nest boxes and roosts has been enclosed, but they can walk in and out of it all day as they like, so they’re not really out any floor space. Since it’s siding over chicken wire, the back and sides of the bottom enclosed area can be opened up during the day in the summer for ventilation and closed up again at night to provide added protection from weather and predators. And since the floor of the space is now at the same level as the rest of the coop’s floor, and there’s a human-sized door to access the area, I can just rake out the floor. Yay! We’re also working on a small storage area inside above one of the nest boxes, to store small containers of grit, oyster shell, and scratch.

The “Bedroom”Two roost bars are natural tree branches from an old lilac of ours, and two are squared wooden rods, so they can choose whichever they like. There are now four nest boxes, the rightmost being the brood box the four little ones standing on it were hatched in. Above that box will be a new storage cupboard. The bottom left, back, and right panels can be removed for ventilation as there is also sturdy chicken wire in place.

The girls have gone from 3 nest boxes, two very short roosts and one longer one to four full-length roosts and 4 nest boxes. When we put them inside it last night, they sat and gabbled loudly, just as if one of them had just laid an egg. Complete confusion! We apparently upset their long-established roosting order, and everyone had to call dibs on a new bit of roost. Two even went back to their old habit of trying to roost in the nest boxes. The four little ones decided they’d be safest up on top of the only flat-topped nest box, and we didn’t discourage them last night. Soon that’s where the storage area will be, so it’ll be a moot point.

The New Wall

The entire roost/nest box area used to only take from the center bar upward. Instead, we’ve moved the chicken access to the lower left floor, removing the need for a ramp, and we’ve installed a human-access door to make cleaning easier. Everything can be locked if necessary, but we usually just latch it.

Poor little ones spent all day inside the roosting area, since they’re new to the flock and smaller than the other girls. I gave them their old feeder full of adult (high protein, all organic) feed and their old waterer full of clean water. Once they assimilate a little better into the pecking order in a week or two, I’ll remove the extra feeder and waterer, but for now I’d rather they not be starving and dehydrated as well as stressed out!

I’ve posted pictures of my Top Bar Beehive before. It’s a lovely creation which my husband made for me out of pine and alder, and for which he created probably the sturdiest, most weatherproof roof in the history of beehives. But it just needed…something.

Enter me with my woodburner. Yeah. Now hand me an English/Quenya* dictionary and an online Tengwar* translator, and stand back.

The result:

The crossbar is translated into Quenya. It reads “Laure Niernore”, which more or less means “Golden Honeybee Dwelling.” The left and right sides are not translated into Quenya, but are merely rough phonetic translations of two quotes about honeybees, minus punctuation and reformatted for space…

“Listen! O, listen!
Here come the hum the golden bees
Underneath full blossomed trees,
At once with glowing fruit and flowers crowned. “
- James Russell Lowell, The Sirens (l. 94)

“In the nice bee, what sense so subtly true
From pois’nous herbs extracts the healing dew?”
- Alexander Pope, Essay on Man (ep. I, 219)

* Quenya is a form of Elvish language from JRR Tolkein’s books about Middle Earth, including The Silmarillion, The Hobbit, and the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Tengwar is the script in which the language is written. If you’re with me so far, you’ll know why I was so tickled that my town’s name translates as “Dagorlad”. If not, you’re not missing anything.

The bees are working busily! They are working on attaching the combs to the side of the hive, which can be seen along the viewing window, and they’ve built comb more than halfway back. By my calculations, they should be hatching out new workers soon, if they aren’t already. Excellent!

They have one of the sturdiest roofs I’ve seen on a hive, built out of random scraps and leftovers we had hanging around our garage:

The entrance to the hive is at the bottom front, that thin “crack” where you can just make out a couple of bees hanging about. The viewing window is on the right side, with the wooden cover in place over it. The whole hive and stand are bolted to a concrete pad on the south side of our house, buffered on the east side by a large rhododendron to screen it from the street and keep the flight path away from the majority of the front lawn. Although most of our weather comes in from the south, which is the direction the opening faces, there are a couple of large trees between the hive and the incoming weather, which should help mitigate any winds.

In order to try to coax the bees to make the straightest comb possible, we are using top bars with a fully triangular cross-section, instead of ones with a thin strip inlaid as a guide. We’ve also made sure it’s level front-back and side-side; bees don’t care about aesthetics or straight comb, but they do react to gravity, so if your top bar or frameless bars are not level, the bees will probably build wonky comb, rendering it difficult to harvest cleanly. This is all purely for ease of harvest for the humans, as the bees don’t care what cross-section the bars have, or if their combs cross or wobble.

* Allowing my geekiness to shine for a moment, this is the phrase I’ll be woodburning on the cross bar under the roof, only I’ll be writing in Tengwar script. It’s Elvish, roughly translating to “Golden Honeybee Dwelling”. Laure Nierlonde (“Golden Honeybee Haven”) was another possibility, but that seems to apply more to the yard than the hive itself, so I chose the former. This is what happens when nerds decide to move to the country…

I’ve had hardy water lilies in a pot for several years now. They moved with me from the old house. Each year they send up lots of pretty green lily pads, and nothing else. This year, they signaled their approval of the new house by giving me a bright, beautiful water lily blossom!

So I just wrote about dealing with the overflow of plastic pots you might have if you buy plants very often. Of course one easy thing to do with them is use them to start new seeds. But if you actually have a situation where you don’t have enough little plastic pots, or yours are all too large, then what?

You can of course buy peat pellets, or the brown biodegradable pots you can plant right along with your seedlings. Or…you can make your own “plantable” pots out of recycled newspaper. Cheaper, available in endless quantities so you never run out in the middle of planting, makes good use of waste materials, and kinda fun to do, especially if you have kids!

There are several methods. All of them require:

* Black and white newsprint (no colored newspaper)
OR plain brown paper, as from shopping bags
OR other plain, uncolored paper, at least 10″ in length and 3.5″ wide
* Scissors or a paper cutter
* Potting soil
* Seeds or seedlings

* Brown paper tape (optional – use paper tape as it’s biodegradable)

Method 1: Storebought Pot Making Tool

I have one of these little doodads, called a Pot Maker. They’re available at various garden stores, and range in price from $9.99 to $19.99, so shop around.

Take your paper, and cut strips 3 1/2″ wide by 10″ (at least) long. Wrap a strip around the pot form, leaving the first corner sticking up a little bit and wrapping the rest around the cylinder part of the form. You should have it fairly even at the top of the cylinder, and have quite a bit sticking over the bottom.

Fold in the bottom on one side, then the other, creating two pointed bits. Fold in one point, then the other. (You rolled coins sometime in your life, right? Same idea.) Press the folded bottom down onto the mold form, and twist a few times to crease. Remove from the form, and fold the little pointy corner you left at the top forward over the side of the pot, to secure it.

Fill with dirt and seeds or seedlings, pack tightly into a seed-starting tray, pan, or box, and you’re good to go!

Method 2: Homemade Pot Making Tool
Two words: Pop Can. Seriously. It’s a little larger than the pot making tool described above, but it’s got the divot on the bottom and it’s cylindrical. Plus it’s basically free. A full pop can will work better than an empty one, just because you won’t have to worry about crushing it, but either way will suffice. And if you crush an empty one, hey, you can always get another.

Measure the paper lengthwise to wrap at least twice around the can, and widthwise to go halfway up the pop can plus 3/4 of the way across the bottom. Proceed as above. When it comes time to smash it onto the bottom form, use a lid from a milk or preferably a juice jug, and press the bottom of the can firmly onto that, twisting to be sure it creases. If you have difficulty getting it to crease, you can add a small piece of brown paper tape to your pot to hold it together.

If you want to make this a more permanent setup, take an empty pop can, fill it with sand, and seal the top tightly with duct tape. For the base, take a block of wood slightly larger than the diameter of the pop can, place a juice jug lid in the center of it, and glue it in place with heavy-duty glue like gorilla glue or barge cement. Not so pretty, but it’ll work well enough!

You can actually use any size cylinder you like, from a fish food container to a can of vegetables. If you don’t have the divot on the bottom for crimping, just secure the bottom fold with a piece of paper tape.

Method 3: Origami
I haven’t the patience for this method, but some people do! It makes containers more sturdy than the above, and some can be done with recycled printer paper (check to be sure your inks don’t contain anything toxic. Soy ink is ideal.)

Some of you probably made origami boxes as a kid. Same idea for newspaper pots! Since I’m not an Origami gal, I’m going to leave some pointers to tutorials.

Origami Seedling Pot Instructional Video – bit long, but thorough, and good design.

Origami Seedling Pot - same basic pot as above, pictures and instructions

Origami Box - Sure looks the same as the others, but it’s from Rachael Ray’s site, and it’s designed for use with thicker paper to make party snack holders.

Origami Seedling Pot Video 2 – About half as long as the first one, same basic pot.

Notes About Newspaper Pots
* I don’t find these pots to be terribly sturdy, so you’re probably going to want to pack them close together in a tray. A reusable seed-starting tray would be ideal, but an old roasting pan (check Goodwill or your local thrift stores) or even a very sturdy cardboard box would do…just remember the cardboard will get wet and eventually disintegrate.

* Again because they’re not terribly sturdy, you’re probably going to want to use a fairly loose, dry potting soil mix to fill the pots. Of course it will compact down when you water it, it just makes loading the little pot easier.

* They do dry out fairly quickly, though if you keep them packed shoulder to shoulder and in a humid greenhouse, it won’t be much of an issue.

* And finally, when it comes to planting these guys, you won’t be able to carry them too far unless your seedlings have become rootbound, in which case the roots will hold the soil together. Just carry the entire tray over to where you’re going to plant, and lift each pot out carefully or they will fall apart. (This is also true of most peat pots after a few weeks of being in the greenhouse, so it’s not really much different.)

I saw that sign on a local Burgerville…”Asparagus – The Pointiest Vegetable”. At the time it made me giggle, but lately I’ve been a little overly excited about asparagus, so I thought I’d share.

A few years ago, someone in my family asked me to pickle some asparagus spears. Okay, I said, bring me some asparagus and lo, I shall render unto it a pickle form. What happened next was not pretty; my father stopped at a farmer’s market in Yakima on his way through, and brought me 45 pounds of asparagus to pickle. That’s a LOT of asparagus. A whole lot. 7 hours worth of work, actually. And the kicker? I don’t even like pickled asparagus.

Anyway, I decided when we moved to a larger property that we needed a permanent asparagus patch. Asparagus is a perennial plant which can produce spears for 25 years, so it’s a good investment. Drawback is that it’s at least 3 years before you can harvest it if you start it from seed, and 2 years before you can harvest from most transplanted crowns. I’ve heard that a 10 foot row of asparagus should yield 5 pounds of asparagus after the third year, though of course I haven’t had it long enough to verify that.

I ended up getting 25 asparagus crowns of a couple of varieties, one of which is the ubiquitous Martha Washington. I planted them out in the vegetable garden and hoped for the best. Well, at least several of them have sent up shoots, whoo! They look just like asparagus from the store. I’m hoping all of them come up, but I won’t know for a while yet if they’ll all survive. I may hit them with some nitrogen rich fertilizer in the meantime to promote vegetative growth.

I also started some asparagus from seed in my greenhouse. After a week of soaking on a paper towel in the house, they did absolutely nothing, so I gave up and planted them in peat pots and just assumed they wouldn’t do anything. Well, I was wrong! They’re sending up slender little tiny shootlets, which I will nurture along in the greenhouse until they’re big enough to transplant. Here I am presented with another issue that I hadn’t really considered; asparagus plants are dioecious, meaning they have male and female plants. Both genders produce flowers, but in the fall the female plants produce red berries which will drop and re-seed the asparagus bed, rendering it potentially crowded and weedy. Buying dormant crowns, you can usually get all male populations and never have to face that issue. Both genders of asparagus are edible, with the female producing more but thinner spears, and the male producing fewer but more robust spears.

In the fall, the asparagus left uncut will go sort of ferny, with flowers and more structure than we’re used to seeing in the spears. This is normal, in case anyone thinks they have mutant asparagus!

Roasted Asparagus

* 1 lb asparagus spears
* Olive oil
* Fresh grated parmesano-reggiano cheese (or regular parmesan)

Heat oven to 400. Roll asparagus spears in olive oil to coat thoroughly, and arrange on a cookie sheet. Sprinkle with the grated cheese, and roast 10 minutes or until tender. Salt and pepper to taste if desired, and eat with your fingers!

* Asparagus, fresh
* Mustard seed
* Dill seed
* 2 cloves peeled garlic per pint, or 4 per quart
* Crushed red pepper flakes
* Lots of ice water and extra ice
* White vinegar (or use half Apple cider vinegar and half white)
* Water
* Rock Salt
* Cane Sugar
* Pickling Spice (remove the cloves)
* Alum

One batch of Brine will cover: 6 quarts of spears plus 1 quart of chunks, or pints to total that much. Depending on how much asparagus you chop, you may need more than one batch of brine.

Prepare a large ice water bath in a tub or large bowl. Next to this, lay several clean towels for drying your asparagus.

Wash the asparagus thoroughly. Snap off the woody ends and discard as described above. Working with the tender portion of the spears, measure the depth of your jars and chop the asparagus spears to fit in the jar with at least 1/2″ left between the top of the asparagus and the jar lid. Keep the bits you chop off; they will pickle just as well as the spears, they just don’t look as cool.

Blanch the asparagus: Bring a pot of water to boil, preferably one with a collander insert like for cooking pasta. Plunge the asparagus into the boiling water and leave for exactly one minute, then remove from the boiling water and plunge immediately into ice water. Use lots of ice, and get it very cold immediately. This helps retain the crispiness. Remove the asparagus when completely cold, and allow to drain on clean towels until thoroughly dry.

Wash and sterilize canning jars by boiling 5 minutes or by running through the hottest setting on your dishwasher. To each clean jar add:

* 1/2 teaspoon mustard seed
* 1/2 teaspoon dill seed
* 2 cloves peeled garlic per pint, or 4 cloves per quart
* 1/2 teaspoon crushed red pepper flakes

For one batch of brine, bring 5 cups water, 1/2 cup rock salt, 1/2 cup cane sugar, 1 Tablespoon pickling spice (remove cloves), and 1 teaspoon Alum to a boil in a large saucepan. Boil for 5 minutes. Remove from heat, add 5 cups vinegar, and cool.

Pack the jars with asparagus. I usually pack spears point up. Be sure you have about 1/2″ headspace between the top of the spears and the lids. You can just fill jars with asparagus chunks any old way, but still leave 1/2″ headspace at the top.

Pour the cooled brine over the asparagus in the jars, covering the asparagus but leaving 1/2″ of headspace. Process 5 minutes in a boiling water bath.

NOTES:
Um, my garlic is blue.
Yeah, that happens. It’ll turn either blue or green sometimes in the pickling brine. It’s harmless.

Boiling Water What?
It’s a canning method. If this is your first time canning something, congratulations! In a nutshell, it means to bring a large pot of water to a boil, then place the hot, filled jars in the water bath. Bring back to a boil, and boil for 5 minutes. Remove the jars from the water, allow to cool overnight. The lids should vacuum seal down (test with your finger; if the lid “pops”, it didn’t seal). Once the seal is set, remove the outer bands and store without them.

If you want more information about canning, I recommend purchasing the Ball Blue Book of Preserving, as it’s a great guidebook. And there is lots of information at the Ball jar home site, Freshpreserving.com.

Bee things proceed apace! This week, I went out and purchased two large wooden planters for my “Bee Garden”. Ordinarily I would put the plants directly into the ground, but I’m not entirely sure where I want these plants to wind up in the eventual garden scheme. So rather than transplant them one or more times, I decided to just put them in a container which I can move around the yard for a season or three before settling them into their final location.

The above planter contains three of my “bee attractive” plants. The large one with the white bell flowers is a Pieris japonica, which will eventually get quite large and definitely need a permanent spot in the yard. (The largest one I’ve seen reached up to the roof of the nearby house.) The smallish broadleaf in the front is a Helleborous niger, also called Lenten rose or just plain hellebore. It blooms in the late winter and often continues to do so through spring. The pinkish one on the right is English heath, which most of us just call heather.

The above planter here shows a dwarf Pieris japonica, together with a pink flowering Viburnum, which will also definitely need a permanent spot in the ground eventually. The Viburnum has the added bonus of bird-attracting berries later in the year.

In finding a spot for my Mason bees, I examined the entire yard. It’s best to give Mason bees a spot where they catch early morning sun so that they can warm quickly and get on with their work of pollinating; Mason bees cannot fly until they warm their bodies up to approximately 55 degrees Farenheight. I do have some walls that catch morning sun, but because of the orientation of my house and garage, and the placement of some large trees, I don’t have a place on a building that both gets early sun and retains it for more than a couple of hours. So, I’m trying what is admittedly a bit of an experiment. I built a tall “faux wall” out near the greenhouse, and mounted the bee houses on it. It has an overhang to protect from the worst rain, and a little shelf under it for the bees to hang out and warm up after emerging from the block.

It’s not advised to hang bee houses on fences or trees, so I have no idea how well this will work. I know the bees won’t get the added bonus of a large, warmed structure behind them for additional heat, but they do have the height and the open flight path that would be afforded by a wall.

This picture is of the Wall O’ Bees. You’ll note my three bee blocks look kind of lonely and helter-skelter…the hope is that in future years I’ll need to install more blocks for a growing horde of bees. Left side is the Mason bee house, empty and waiting. Middle is a smaller block for Aphid eating wasps. I haven’t got many plants in the yard that attract aphids right now, so I don’t know if I have a wild population of wasps or not. The right side is a Leafcutter bee house. In front of the entire operation I’ve stapled black bird netting; I realized that by placing these on a board with a nice landing pad in front, I’d basically created a diner for my downy woodpeckers, flickers, and jays. Right now the tube of hibernating bees is still in my refrigerator, though I will be putting it out in the next day or two as the Bee Plants open up.

With all of this preparation, the goal is to have a colony of Mason bees established for next spring. I’m in the middle of selecting fruit tree and berry varieties for planting in the next few weeks, with an eye towards the first real harvest being next year. One thing that’s true for gardening; it can be an exercise in long-term planning!