Earthworks

I think everyone can relate to the experience of seeing something done badly or wrong, and wanting desperately to fix it. For me, it's all the little things people do wrong when building or renovating. I don't have construction experience, but I have a B.Arch and five years of experience working at architecture firms, so I know a little bit about how things are supposed to be built even if I don't know exactly how to do it. As an example, everyone who has rented probably has experience with the "floor tiles used places other than the floor" phenomenon. The last apartment I lived in had the same tile on the bathroom floor, shower surround, kitchen floor, kitchen counters, and backsplash. I think it's to save money and time, since floor tiles are large so you don't spend as much time grouting, and you can just buy one kind of tile, but it's ugly (little ceramic tiles are so much prettier and neater looking than big stoneware slabs) and gross (I don't want to be put in mind of my bathroom floor while chopping food on my kitchen counter) and lazy. This practice is common, in fact my current place has the same tiles on kitchen floor and counter, but that makes it no less maddening for someone like me who cares about that sort of thing. But I didn't start writing to complain about tiles, I wanted to complain about our greenhouse. I can tell that the greenhouse has many fatal flaws. Sometimes I wish the builder had spent a little less time carving pentagrams and a little more time researching siting and drainage. In any case, the greenhouse's days are numbered, but I am doing a few things to extend its life as much as possible by concentrating on the three main drainage issues.

For example, the building has a concrete slab foundation, which is very nice and sturdy and all those good things, but it needs a drain. In a greenhouse, one is often watering the plants, which means there is often water on the floor - which, when a floor has no drain, runs to the low spots and pools there. These low spots happen to be in the northwest and northeast corners right next to the wall, so you can imagine what those are like.

Here's another problem. There were narrow raised garden beds edged with a row of large stones along the east and north walls. However, these were created by mounding up the soil right onto the plywood cladding. They stapled a strip of black plastic against the wall, but it didn't help to prevent rot. Generally what you want to do is keep the level of the soil below the top of the foundation, so that the soil is only in contact with concrete, stone, or brick. Anyway, these raised beds were not made correctly, and they were also planted with English ivy which our landlord has tasked us with removing, so I have been digging up the roots and spreading the soil out flat.

This leads me to the third problem. In general, when a structure is built you want the ground sloping gently away from the foundation on all sides. Thus, rainwater drains away from the foundation instead of pooling around it. Well, unfortunately there is a slight rise to the northwest of the greenhouse, and all the rainwater from there is trapped next to the wall with no way to flow around the building and continue on down the slope. So I have been attempting to regrade the earth in the area. Here's a little plan diagram to try to explain what I'm doing. The red arrow is the greenhouse, the green things are trees (the little green circles are stumps), and the brown and blue lines show what I'd like the topography to be like and how I hope the water will flow.

A Little Kitchen Inspiration

Even though we are just renting, I spend time dreaming about changes I would make to the house and garden. If we do end up buying this place, I would like to renovate the interior. I usually daydream about this while doing work around the place, because it motivates me to continue!

This is the kitchen, if you recall. It fulfills its function as a cooking space, but it could be so much better! I took a little time today to look up some images of traditional Japanese kitchens. . .

Maybe not that traditional.

Here are some more modern kitchens in traditional style homes. I like these. Dark wood, lots of open shelving, small and simple spaces.

I don't want to make an exact replica of a Japanese house. There are already a few shoji screens inside (between the blue room and the bathroom, and into the master bedroom upstairs) but that's the only nod to Japanese design indoors. I'd like the indoors to match the exterior, but I don't want it to look like Disneyland.

Eggs and Potatoes

Apologies for the recent dearth of posts, dear readers. I assure you, it is due entirely to the time-consuming nature of my current projects, and not to any faltering of the will to blog. I have become even more immersed in all things chicken as I raise three chicks (for a current total of five birds) and work on the chicken coop addition to the greenhouse. This coop is my first major building project, and construction is slow as I research how to build, make mistakes and have to rebuild, and occasionally suffer minor injuries.

It's not all work, though. The Sunday of Labor Day weekend, RC and I stopped to check out the Yelm farmers market, which is organized by the Yelm Food Co-op and hosted by Nisqually Springs Farm. The market (and the food co-op) is relatively small and new; I think this is only its second summer, but I thought it was a great little event. We drank delicious root beer floats served by the happiest woman on earth, ate roasted corn, and bought a jar of hot sauce and lots of beautiful produce. There was even live music! A band of one middle-aged man and two middle-aged women called, I believe, Big Daddy and the Hot Flashes.

The vendor I most enjoyed meeting was the potato guy. A gregarious man with a long gray beard, he treated every potential customer to a description of his farming methods and all the different potato varieties he's created, while showing off an impressive array in all shades of yellow, red, and purple and shapes from big and round to long and knobby. He showed off a long, skinny and crooked, dark purple-brown specimen of a variety he'd created and named Witch's Finger! I bought two pounds of a pinkish-yellow round type called Harlequin, and I can attest that they were very tasty.

The reason I enjoyed meeting him so much is because he represents exactly the sort of wizened old rural weirdo that I love and admire and hope to become someday. I am impressed with his dedication to potatoes. I am also impressed that he uses no gas-powered equipment of any kind in his fields, instead using a horse and plow. I mean, goddamn.

My goal is to eventually have a large enough poultry operation to produce eggs for sale, not just for our own consumption. I went to the farmers market not just to buy veggies but to check it out as a potential place to sell, and I noticed that there were no egg vendors there. Meat and dairy, yes, but no eggs, so there is a place for me!

Also, I think we (the chickens and I) will be able to provide very interesting eggs that most people around here don't get too often. You see, when I went to the feed store a few days ago, I got to talking to the sales dude about chicken breeds, and he was quite impressed that I have a Cuckoo Maran and Welsummers, because not many hatcheries produce them. So just as the potato guy has all his different potato varieties, so I could provide a rainbow of egg colors from unique chicken breeds. All free range, of course, which you can easily discern for yourself when you see the chicken poop on the porch.

Peepers

We got a couple of new chicks!

They are Welsummers, and are about two months old. They can't live in the coop for another month, so I set up a brooder in a plastic tub with a wire mesh top. I also constructed this mini chicken tractor you see in the pictures, so they can have some supervised outdoor time every day!

These little peepers are so cute. Sometimes I just sit there staring at them and space out completely. And every time they do anything (groom their feathers! Scratch the dirt! Perch on the roosting bar!) I squeal because they are just like chickens! But they're little babies! Eeeee!

Getting them is bittersweet because one of our hens, Felicity, was just killed. Right after Minerva managed to defy death, Felicity succumbed. But I suppose that is something I'll have to get used to living in a rural area. Meanwhile, I'll try to train the little ones as attack chickens, and maybe outfit them with spikes.

Gardening

We have been hard at work on the garden attached to the west side of the greenhouse. It's been neglected for years like everything else, but we are making some progress!

If you are wondering what it looked like before, just picture a patch of weeds. Okay? Now here it is. RC whacked all the weeds and underneath there was this raised bed, so we amended the soil in it and planted 21 tomato seedlings with lettuce, cilantro, and green onions in between. As an aside: whenever I say "green onions" that song by Booker T and the MG's starts playing in my head. Around the existing raised bed we have been creating paths, and then there will be more beds all around the perimeter next to the fence.

Here are the tomatoes! You can also see the green onions (cue music) sprouting down front. I was able to cut all those bamboo stakes myself from our supply, which is pretty cool. I will never have to buy bamboo stakes again, and you know bamboo has many other uses as well. Who wants bamboo sake cups for Christmas?!

Here is the patio next to the greenhouse. If you're wondering what it used to look like, picture a patch of weeds covered in trash. I'm still not done with the patio; I want to get all the weeds out from between the paving stones and put something in there, a creeping ground cover or maybe just sand. I hung up that hose hook thing yesterday and boy is it great to not have the hose snaking all over the ground.

If you're wondering, I'm still working on the chicken coop addition to the greenhouse. The coop will be inside where the outer wall is painted red. I've been figuring out exactly what I'm going to build, and then exactly what materials I need, what sizes and lengths of wood and so on. Then I have to figure out how much it will all cost; however, I think I can get a lot of salvaged materials from the Habitat for Humanity ReStore here in Yelm.

Some things growing in the greenhouse. We have tomatoes, cucumber, chili peppers, and watermelon inside, and of course I'm starting all my seeds in there. I planted that bean seedling out in the garden today! Hutterite beans are an heirloom white bean. In the past I've not had the room to get more than a small handful of beans from some container-grown plants, but now that I have space I will someday be able to make a whole pot of beans that I grew myself, and that's pretty exciting! Maybe with some collards I grew myself to go alongside?

Okay, here's some branches of our apple tree. I don't know what kind it is, but it's got all these apples on it! The only things I've done for this tree are to clear the weeds about 3' all around the trunk and apply compost there, and I thinned out the apples so they have room to grow without touching each other. We have four other apple trees, but they were planted in, like, the WORST places. Under giant fir trees, next to buildings, etc, so this one is the only one with apples. It still needs a lot of care, though. It's a very weird, leaning shape, and I don't know whether it was pruned that way on purpose or if it was the work of deer. But hey, at least it was planted in a place where it gets a lot of sun.

Other than the garden, we've been busy of course with everything else. Our beaver dam demolition plans are on hold as we get a permit from the Department of Fish and Wildlife. We had a wildlife biologist from that department out to look at our situation and advise us what to do. I felt pretty bad when we went to look at the dams because she fell into a hidden deep pool and she was soaked up to chest height! But after we inspected everything and she changed clothes, she told me that in fact, the beavers have moved on and we can just create large notches in each dam to let the water flow through, rather than having to build any sort of beaver deceiving devices. Still have to get a permit, though.

Okay, now I have to talk about two problems we've been having. One is the solar collector. Everything on the property is original to when it was built, 20 years ago. This means we have nice things like double pane windows, but twenty-year-old solar panels are really, really old and outdated. If we have a couple cloudy days, or if we need to give the garden a good, long watering, we are out of electricity. The landlord is going to get a generator which will attach to the propane tank, so we can have electricity even if it's cloudy. She has talked about getting more solar panels, but I'll bet if we just replaced the current ones with new ones we'd be in business. Anyway, the other problem is the fridge. The original fridge never really worked right, only got the temperature down around 55 degrees. Well, the handyman Brian took it away and we've been fridge-less for quite a while. Do you know how hard it is to find a propane-powered refrigerator? That isn't a tiny one meant for an RV? Must be pretty hard. Anyway, we could get ourselves a mini fridge to tide us over, but it would probably kill the power! So we are living the refrigeration-free lifestyle for a little bit. It's not so bad except that I really miss ice in my drinks.

I will close with a picture of our little bantam Minerva in her secret nest she built to brood on a batch of six little blue eggs. The silly bird stayed out there all night one night and caused me great emotional distress because when I went to put the chickens up and she wasn't in the coop, in fact was nowhere to be found, I went crazy looking all over with a flashlight, then I got very sad as I figured she had been snatched by a predator, and then I had to cry it out and say a chicken eulogy. . . It was a bad scene. But there she was again in the morning, and by that afternoon I had found her nest and moved the eggs inside which caused her to stop brooding anyway. But I thought her secret nest was very clever and she looked very cute sitting in it, the little jerk.

Swamplands

We have taken a couple more trips to the dams since my last post. In the first trip, most of our time was taken up trying to find the dam and make the shortest possible path to it from the driveway. Our second trip we brought along our friend Kayla, and the three of us explored further than the first time to try to figure out how things were laid out and to start to formulate a plan of attack. And although it's fun to muck about and swamps are beautiful places, we discovered that the construction was much more extensive than we first realized. Cue the sad trombone! There are actually three dams, though the westernmost one (closest to the bridge) is the largest. Once we came upon a dam, we would look over the edge to see yet another stagnant pool. I was imagining them going on forever, but after the third the creek was flowing, though it was wide and reedy and split into several smaller streams. I've drawn a little sketch for reference:

North is up in this picture. The blue lines represent where the creek should run, and the red lines represent the driveway, running along to pass by the cabin and cross the bridge. The squiggly cyan line represents the overflowing water, and of course the magenta curves are the dams. Dam 1 is the biggest and newest, and they get progressively smaller and older as you travel east in the direction of the water flow. We made some small holes in the dams at the yellow X's, both to try to drain away some water, and to see what would happen. Would they be fixed immediately by beavers in the night, or are these older dams not maintained like the big one is? The yellow line going perpendicularly through Dam 1 is where I think we should put the beaver pipe. That is the newest and largest area of construction, where the dam is built up at least as tall as me.

This time, I brought along the iPhone in the handy waterproof pocket on the front of my waders, and took some pictures. I find this whole area to be beautiful, even though it's not really "supposed" to look like this. To the beavers I guess it looks perfect, but they don't have to worry about a flooded driveway.

Anyway, a couple days later I came back by myself to see if the holes we had made had been patched up. It appeared as if they had not; though some new sticks and debris were crossing and blocking them somewhat, it seemed to just be due to the water flowing and not to beaver activity. I'm not an expert even a little bit, but from what I've read beavers will completely patch up a hole good as new in one night.

I have to tell a funny story about that morning. I was clearing out one of the holes and went to pick up what looked like a bundle of sticks, but when I touched it and saw it closer up IT WAS A DEAD BEAVER. I shrieked and gagged. I screamed aloud that I hated the country because I just kept finding and touching dead animals. Then I started to examine it (from afar); it was laying right on top of the hole I had made (there was still mud built up underneath, so it was right next to the surface of the water. I noted the back legs, sticking straight up with little feet and big claws. I saw the wide, flat tail, which looked rough and pitted from decomposition. I saw the clumpy, matted brown fur. I steeled myself, grabbed a stick, and tried to move it. It wouldn't budge, I imagined having to dig it out of the mud and gagged again. But as I continued to look. . . it turned back into the clump of sticks wrapped tightly together with dead grasses that it has always been! I kicked it a few times and it came apart and floated away down the stream, but now even though I'm not usually a mystical person I can't help but feel that it was a message of some kind. From the beavers, perhaps? I think if they could talk they would say to us, "you'll have to kill us to get us to leave. Otherwise, we're just going to stay here forever, breeding and eating bark and felling trees." Good thing they've never heard of beaver pipes!

Beavers and chickens

Big news! And I mean really big: we found the beaver dam yesterday morning. No pictures since we were mucking about, but it's located east of the creek a few hundred yards and it's huge! I guess, technically, it's two dams, but they are right next to each other in a line and work together to block the entire swamp and all the water. No wonder the driveway floods in the rainy season.

Now, of course, the real work starts. Our plan as of now is to breach the dam in a few places (where there are dry creek beds on the other side) and put in beaver deceivers or beaver pipes. Basically, we would run a long, wide, flexible pipe perpendicularly through the dam, held in place on the creek bed by tying it to short pieces of rebar sunk into the ground. This way even if/when the beavers rebuild the dam, water is still able to flow. That's the plan; we will have to see if it's possible. If not we may look into trapping. If anyone reading like to trap, we've got at least fifty beavers so come get them! Apparently they are quite tasty and make nice top hats, too.

The other bit of news is that after living here for a few weeks, I've decided that the chicken coop is located in the least convenient place possible. One reason to keep chickens is that they are very helpful in the garden; they weed, till, and eat insects, and you can compost their manure to make really good fertilizer. However, the chicken coop is on the complete opposite side of the house from the garden. I tried to herd them over there myself one day, which was such a slapstick comedy of errors that I decided NEVER AGAIN. In addition, the current coop is not quite right for our needs, and is too dark and unventilated for my liking. So after some thinking, I've decided to build a new coop inside the greenhouse. Having a greenhouse/coop is apparently an old permaculture idea which benefits birds and plants alike, and I figure building one wall in an existing structure will be easier and quicker than constructing an entire new building.

Above is the north end of our greenhouse. I just realized when I started thinking about this project that the greenhouse is shaped like an arrow that points south. So while the south end has some funny short walls and odd angles, the north end is nice and square, and has a big window.

I want to build the fourth coop wall at the second stud, so the coop will be about four feet deep and 9'-5" wide. These walls were insulated and then clad with Mylar film, which when peeled back revealed some horrifying things such as a DEAD SQUIRREL that I accidentally TOUCHED with my HAND. The insulation was all chewed up and full of sunflower seed husks. I bagged up all the film and insulation this morning and got a good look at the structure; unfortunately the northwest corner where the walls meet the floor is all rotten and full of insect holes, probably from carpenter ants. I'll be sure to blog along with all the fascinating/disgusting prep work, but for now I've made a little sketch to help visualize the coop:

Bok bok! (And whatever sound beavers make.)