Low hoop house build..

That's what they call one of these things, anyway.. I'm most of the way through a book called "The Four Season Harvest" by Elliot Coleman.. husband of Barbara Damrosch, author of "The Garden Primer" one of my favorite gardening books. Pretty good husband/wife team, right there. Both books recommended to me by a pal of mine, who is also a bit of a cold season farmer himself (Hi Kevin!). I had initially set out ot build a cold frame, with raised sides and flat glass 'lights' to let the sunshine in, but after reading this book, and perusing some other sources, I've decided to go with what the call a 'Low Hoop House'. Think big, full size plastic covered greenhouse all shrunk down to about 2-3' tall and you've got the idea. Technically, I think a greenhouse you can walk into is called a High Hop House, and one you can't fit into is called a Low Hoop House. So, that's what I've got.

The idea is to provide a bit of protection from the elements, and raise the temp's inside a bit to keep things from totally freezing solid and getting ruined. Or, if things *do* get frozen, during the day the sun can warm 'em back up and the ice/whatnot melts off, and you harvest stuff in the late morning or afternoon times. There's a couple of key things with these buggers to keep in mind.. one is that there's different kinds of vegetables, some like it hot, some like it in-between temperature wise and some actually prefer it downright cold. The key for the  growing season in the fall and the subsequent winter harvest is simply to grow the right kinds of vegetables. Mostly this is gonna consist of things like leafy greens and other stuff, like carrots, which would also apply. The best of the bunch is stuff called Mache, the Chards, spinach, Brussels sprouts.. etc. The next key thing to keep in mind is that really *none* of these things actually grow in the cold.. they just don't get kicked to the curb, stomped on and destroyed when the temperatures dip into the 20's and 30's. They *survive*. They thaw. They manage to carry on. So, you gotta grow 'em when it's still fairly nice out (it's key lettuce, radish, chard season right now! I blew it on Brussels' sprouts, though..) and then protect 'em with some sort of covering, like a cold frame, a low hoop house, or a full-size greenhouse, if you're that fortunate. This post will just document the on-the-cheap build of my low hoop house. When I say cheap, I'm literally talking $20.14 out the door, with  some parts left over that I didn't even use. You could probably make this thing for $16 and change. And hell, it might just collapse with the first snow or violent wind.. but if it keeps my lettuce alive for 3 more weeks than it would have otherwise, who's better than me? Plus, in the spring, it'll help harden off the tomatoes and peppers and such, and let me start growing more cold tolerant things in Feb or March. And that's what I'm talking about. Check it:

Start with this stuff.. three or so 2x4's (which will eventually be ripped to 2x2 dimension..) or buy  few more 2x2's already cut. 2x4's are about the same price as 2x2's, so when you rip 'em down the middle, it's like a two for one special. A small bag of plastic pipe hangers (in the plastic bag there..) and a couple of PVC crosses, some PVC T's and I used four 10 foot lengths of PVC pipe, which we eventually cut a few feet of the bottom of to get the arch's just right.

Then use a Dremel tool or a big drill bit to hog out the insides of the PVC T's and crosses in the right places so that the PVC pipe can slide through them. The pic shows the inside of one bored out, and the other one slid up onto the PVC pipe.. You'll see how this slides together in a minute..

Next, build yourself a wooden frame from the 2x2's that'll fit nicely over top of your raised (or un-raised, I suppose..) bed..

..use the pipe hangers to trap the ends of the pipes onto the frames..

until you have something resembling this:

This could be a total piece of crap, keep in mind. My testing will either confirm or disprove that statement.

When you're done, drag it down and test fit the thing over top of your bed/beds. It should look something like this does:

Since I have a lip of 2x6 that's raised up a bit that runs the whole length of the back side of my bed here, I sorta use that as a hinge.. it's not a hinge, but it keeps the frame from calling off the bed in the back and allows me to easily tilt the frame up. If your borders are all even around the edges, you might wanna put a couple of hinges there to make it easy to tilt up and get into your beds.

Now, later on next month when it starts to get cold, I'll bring out some clear or translucent plastic and cover the thing, stapling it in place along the edge. You can lift up the whole frame like I'm doing in this pic to reach in and grab stuff from inside, and then drop it back down when you're finished. If it's warm in the day, you're gonna have to prop the cover up so as not to bake the veggies inside there.. supposedly, these things can boost the temps inside 10-15 degrees. Imagine if you've got a nice75 degree fall day,sunny out, and the temp inside there goes up to 85-90 degrees F, and you've got instant ruined produce.

That's all for now.. carry on.

Jeremiah's brewery.. sick!

Better be sitting down, cause this one is a bit weird. Check this out.. hybrid electric propane brewery with a CRANK UP, ADJUSTABLE HEIGHT BOIL KETTLE! What the!

Here's an overview of the thing.. note how low it is to the ground. He did it like this because his ceiling height is lower than my garage is, for example.. so, he made the boil kettle sit low to the ground while boiling, and then adjustable height (it cranks up) simply to drain it with gravity! Wacky..

Here's a shot of the crazy hand made strap crank he configured. It rolls up the side bars with the vertical bars as locator's and skateboard wheels to slide it up the pipes. Bizarre!:

Here's the thing in the low, boiling position:

Then turn the crank and it's up in the air to gravity feed into a carboy..

Out of control! Then, there's the totally awesome upside down dead center drain ports, to say the least of awesome-ness. This this is definitely unique.

The false bottom is a perforated folding setup in the mash-tun. Other than the really trick bottom drained sight glass in the HLT, it's also got a 5500watt powered electric element. This thing.. I swear, you can't make this up.. if I hadn't seen it with my own eyes, I'd say it wasn't possible, but we put in 8.6 gallons of 76 degree water in the tun and ramped it to 100 deg in 4min 45sec.. then 130 deg in 9min 50sec, and got it up to strike water temp of 160 deg in only 15min 39seconds. Unreal! Electric is totally mind boggling. The power of these elements over propane is numbing. Check this vid of the HLT boiling water by itself on the concrete floor:

Sorta speaks for itself, but this boil was way too hardcore. We need to bring this way down to use in a boil kettle.. I'm thinking 1500 to 2000 watts to keep a mild simmer.. 5500 was raging.  All inspiring stuff, at least. There's just really something awesome about plugging in a plug and then simply flipping a switch to have enormous power in your kettle. It really made propane look like a joke.. seriously, a kids toy in comparison. I'm a believer.

In any case, he brought this stuff over and we whipped up a Belgian style Dubbel on bits and pieces of both of our systems put together. It came out great and we hit the numbers on it. Stay tuned in a couple weeks for the results of that one.

Planter update..

Hey Savvas, here's that update you were askin' about for the planter on the deck.. the one I realized I hadn't taken any pics f since I pretty much planted the thing? It's my most productive component right now. Sorta embarrassing..

Check these silly Radishes:

There's actually some lettuce in there, too.. a couple of Simpsons and a could of Red Ridinghoods as well.. we also planted some flowers in the middle, but they never took off. Oh, forgot.. there's a basil on either end as well. And those are doing quite well! You just can't see 'em underneath all the radishes. Who knew they got so big? Here's one I just plucked and ate, shortly thereafter:

All carved up and washed.. and in my belly now.

Yeah, these are those red on top, white on bottom ones.. I forget what they call 'em offhand, but that's them. Tasty buggers..

Garden update..

Well, was with much anxiety that I pulled up all but one of the tomato plants in the lower raised bed. So sad! :) There's one left with a few more cherry tomato's on it, but that'll probably get pulled in the next couple of days or so.. I gotta get to the meat of this book "Four Season Harvest" by Elliot Coleman, so I can figure out the best type of cold frame for me to build there. I'm still undecided on if I'm going to do a whole 4x8 bed or just a half shooter in a 4x4 square. Still pondering that..

Check this sweet tomato I just picked from the Global Bucket project planter on the deck:

Nice work, right there.. I'm excited to see how well that thing came out. Gives good hope for next years crop of sause tomatos I'm gona do entirely on the deck in those same type buckets.

Anyway, this is the state of the garden as of this moment:

You can see the tomatos are all but gone from the lower bed. I'm probably gonna fence in the area, protect the turnips and lettuce, and let the chickens in there for a few hours or days, so they can have a bit of fun with the leftover fruits in there. They'll have a blast, I'm sure..

I'm also getting huge amounts of shade in both beds now that fall is coming up here.. the lower sun isn't getting over the tops of the trees now until around 1000 hours, whereas before it was fully blast right about 0800-0830 hours. No wonder my lettuce is slowing to a crawl.

Also, just pulled a radish out of the planter bow on the deck.. it was small, but it was tasty! The radishes in the planter are HUGE in comparison to the ones in the beds.. no comparison, really. In fact, if the beds get any grown radishes at all this time around, I might be surprised.. unless the cold frame does something magic in there.

Pretty soon, I'm also gonna do some measuring up and set up my squares for the square foot garden project. I know Mel says you aren't doing it right if you don't have solid, wood or whatever divider grids, but that stuff just isn't going to work for what I have in mind. It's gonna be twine for me, wether Mel agrees or not. The principal I like.. and that's what counts. Stay tuned for those developments in the near future..

The Am. pale ale I just did, solo style, is done with it's main ferment.. gonna keg that up for the Pink Shirt party coming up.. and I just had a taste of the Am. Amber I did with Commando Savvas.. strangely, still not carbed, but I guess it's only been 7 days.. usually takes 10, but hey, I can hope, right? It's *very* promising.

I got nuthin' else.. carry on.

Big brewin'

Here's a couple pics of me hanging out in the mashtun and boil kettle and stuff after joining my pal Timmay for a day of big boy brewing in a commercial environment. Timmay works at Cambridge Brew House, if you're not in the know, as the head brewer. He recently took over this joint from the last brewer and is already turning things around there. He took further steps to assure greatness in the finished beer by having me join him the other week, where we brewed up an Octoberfest for the upcoming Fall season. Check some of this out:

We did some milling of grains first, lofting up a few hundred lbs of grains on our shoulders and feeding them into a two stage, one pass, grain mill. That was easy enough.. went through right quick.

Here's me stirrin' the mash in the big tun after the grains were milled up. Yep, they still do it the old fashioned way here.. and that's pretty typical for a lot of brew pubs. Nothing fancy except some generally hard work with a big paddle for this step.

After that, we did some runoff of the wort into the kettle, and then it was time to clean out the spent grains from the mashtun. Dig it:

Me, just shoveling. All went into some big bins and then a farmer from New Hartford came to scoop it up from up to feed to some cows. Lucky cows.

Then, some interior detail work on the same tun:

This shot is taken from the side hatch, looking up out the top of the hatchway where in the first pic I was stirring. That thing I'm polishing there is the spray head thingy, where the hot water comes down out of to spray onto the grain bed to rinse the sugers down into the kettle.

And finally, me, peeking my head out the top of the boil kettle.. didn't get any shots of the interior of this while I was there, but I was able to crawl right in and check the thing out from the inside. Interesting, and slightly claustrophobic experience!

I loved it. It was a great time and very enlightening. The equipment is interesting, configurable, and quite flexible in its operation. Really neat stuff.

Some day..

Till then, carry on..

Canning and Propagating..

Cool stuff this time around.. first, I did my first canning  operation at home here, with the help of my pal Crystal. She's a highly experienced canner, and really made pro work of the whole project. Well, except she stuck her hand in boiling water once.. oh, and goofed around with seriously hot peppers and wasn't wearing gloves which caused her to cry most of the night because of burning fingers from the Jalapeno's and Habanero's capsaicin. But that's trivial stuff. Check these pics of the process:

Here's Crystal, smashing some Hab's into the jars.. what a pro!

..a pic of the whole operation..

..and a shot of the finished products.

All in all, we made a buch of these jars up and every one of them sealed up fine. Crystal made off with a few of 'em, and I've got 6 half pint jars and 9 whole pint jars to show for our 3.5-4 hour process. The process itself was pretty straight forward, but time consuming. We used the stove in the kitchen, as you can see from the pics, but I think next time we do this, I'll drag out the brewery equipment and we'll use that stuff to heat our water up. Most of the time wasting was due to poor heat up times for the boiling water, which a 55k brewery burner would make short work of. We'll keep that in mind for next time, like I said. 

In other news, I just got my Garland "Super 7" seedling propagator in the mail yesterday. Check this out:

This is the tiny 4x6 seeding propagator tray.. the holes in the bottom allow the water from the lower tray to be wicked up the, well, wicking material, and into the tray, so you never have to take off the top cover to water these. They always stay perfectly hydrated, just like a sub-irrigated planter would. That's pretty much what sold me on this thing, because of the promise I saw with my Earthbox and 'Global Bucket' projects.. 

Here's the water tray and the standoff I mentioned above, that keep the little propagators from sinking in the water.. 

And here's that funny water wicking material that goes on top of the standoff, and under the trays, to bring the water up to the soil. 

Here's an overall view of the contraption, and you can see that there's 7 trays with covers in total.

The other thing that really sold me was.. you get things that germinate at different rates, like at 68 degrees, our typical basement temp in the winter (coal stove power!), lettuce will come up in about 3 days, but peppers will take up to nearly 2 weeks.. if all the seedlings were in one large tray of some sort, you'd have some things out of the soil and some things still in the ground all going at different times. Ideally, you want to keep the clear tops on while things germinate to keep the moisture in, and then take the tops off after they break the surface, so you don't get mold growth. This setup allows that action, because everything can be kept individually growing in their own compartments. Nice idea. 

Also, these things are made from *thick*, reusable plastic. As long as I don't run these over with a car, they'll last a good long time. I'm not sure how long the thinner plastic kits will last. Still, I've never used this before, so we'll see how it goes. I do have some experience 'pricking out' seedlings and keeping them alive now, since I've been screwing with my planter box on the deck. I have at least some faith, because of that. :)

Anyhow, that's what I've got for the day.. so, get lost!

Potato harvest..

Here's the big potato harvest of 2010. Dig it..

Impressive, no? And heck, not even all of them are edible.. not counting the tiny ones, there's a few of the medium size'ers there that have a bug hole in 'em. Fortunately, the biggest of the bunch seems to be in good condition, and might be able to have a go 'round with my belly. ;-) Still contemplating that right now..

In addition, there was a pretty good pull for the rest of the joint, too. Check this colorful bunch:

Nice. The Habaneros are all ripening up quick now, about 8-10 a day all at once. Curious.. I hope to be able to can up the Jalapeno's this weekend with my friend Crystal, but we'll see how that goes.

In beer news, the lactic infused Stout seems to have a bit of a film over the top, indicating a good lactic buildup. But, I can't see it clearly enough to get a picture of it to show. I'll have it on tap soon enough, 'cause the Big Bear stout is nearing it's end. The Am. Amber wet-hop version I just did with Savvas is almost ready to keg, too.. just gotta find a spot to put it in and it'll be on line.

I hate my dog.

The garden planter box thingy is also doing well, but a bug ate the basil on the left ide of the planter. I just finished taking up one of the extra basils on the right hand side and transplanted it to the left, so we'll see how my first proper seedling transplant goes. apparently, you're supposed to wait till you get a few of the second 'true' leaves to form before you transplant it. I guess that's why I've been killin' 'em all up.. I've got high hopes for this recent move, though. Otherwise, the radishes are all going wild and the lettuces are having a great time. In fact, I also just took a couple of the extra lettuces and put them into tiny pots to grow on the side, instead of snipping them off to clear the way for the biggest ones. We'll do that just for fun.. probably won't much become of it. I'll get some pics of that when I can.. camera is still charging now.

Also in gardening news, I ordered up the seedling starter thing I finally decided on, and it's not the Hydrofarm Hot House with the heat mat, or even the Burpee kit I was looking at. Just happened to stumble across this setup by accident and fell in love with it. I'll get some pics when it arrives.. but it's really neat.