Harvest

We picked the bigger heads of rye and left the rest for the turkeys and deer. Now it will hang upside down for a bit to make the heads easier to grab – then we'll try the chicken-wire-and-plywood winnowing technique. Stay tuned.

Instant Chicken Tractor

Well, not so instant. i've been working on it for what seems weeks.

The top went together pretty easily. My neighbor gave us her old coop - a Ware Chick-N-Villa.  I was sure I could transform it into a chicken tractor ... a moveable coop you reposition each day to give the ladies access to new weeds and bugs. With a tractor, you get all the benefits of free-range birds without the constant danger from predators.

Raw materials.

It needed a bit of reinforcement here and there but it was largely intact. The previous owner had built a small extension which makes the coop just big enough for four birds.

After thinking about design for a day or two, I settled on fastening the whole thing together with two 10-foot deck planks. I repaired the missing bits of cage wire and wired the bottom with four-inch fence to keep the raccoons and foxes out. The four-inch holes in the fence are plenty large for the birds to scratch and peck in the organic lawn.

The finished tractor.

To make it mobile, I added a pair of wheels from Harbor Freight – $12 for the pair. That was the tricky part. The challenge is getting the wheels out of the way so the tractor sits flat on the ground when you're not rolling it. Otherwise the chickies have a harder time walking around the fence material and the gap invites predators.

Went through several design ideas, none worked. Finally settled on a rotating arm arrangement which allows the wheels to swing out of the way when the tractor is stationary.

So far, so good. The chickies are so happy to be out of their brooder – and since the coop has a built in light bulb, they'll be toasty overnight after the temperature drops.

My goal was getting it all done for under $100. Total came in around $75.

Ready to roll.

Laid flat.

Chickies!

Here they are ... our newest addition. Two Americanas and two Brown Layers. They are growing like weeds. In this photo, enjoying the organic lawn – hanging out in a repurposed dog kennel. (Coop under construction.)

The Last Wheelbarrow

I just shoveled 20 yards of compost – and boy are my arms tired.

Having 20 yards of compost delivered was a great idea because it saved hours and hours of driving the trailer to the landfill and waiting for the bulldozer.

It wasn't such a great idea because it meant I had to shovel 20 yards of compost.

But - it gets the upper body in tone after a winter confined to desk work. There's always ibuprofen for the lower back.

And the lawn has never looked better.

My Emerald Waves of Grain

Sometimes a good idea turns into a great one.

Last fall, I was checking out at the feed & seed store. Saw a sack of seed under a hand-scrawled sign. “Rye. Great winter cover.”

From a distance I assumed it was some kind of ryegrass. Moving closer, I grabbed a handful. As a baker and brewer, I’ve had enough food grain in my hands over the years to recognize it. It wasn’t turfgrass seed, it was rye – Secale cereale, the grain used to make bread and whiskey.

“You guys sell rye?” I asked, somewhat surprised.

“Oh yeah. Folks love it in their gardens. You let it grow all winter then plow it under in the spring,” came the store guy’s response.

Wheels turned. I’m thinking harvest, not cover. Bread, beer, who knows?

“When do you plant it?” I asked.

“Right now,” he said. 

I grabbed two pounds. I had visions of using it to create a no-mow strip right in the middle of the front yard. But since we’d never grown it before and had no idea what to expect, the Mrs. was less than enthusiastic about that plan. So I opted for the spot that I knew couldn’t possibly get any worse: the backyard desert.

My backyard has a strip of bone-dry death, about 150 feet long and 10 feet wide. Next to nothing grows there. Not even crabgrass. About all that could get footing in that spot was the occasional broom sedge and wild lettuce. Mostly it was just hard, ugly, barren dirt – a haven for burrowing wasps. 

I scattered the rye there, expecting zilch. After all, I had scattered grass seed there for years, eventually giving up on it as nothing after nothing took root.

I irrigated on and off – not as much as I should have. Fortunately we had a decent amount of rain that fall. And within weeks, this barren scar of sterile desert was greening up. I could scarcely believe my own eyes.

I’ve since learned that rye is a great thing to plant in bad soil. It has fairly strong roots that break up compacted soil. When the annual stalks die off, the roots and straw add biomass to the soil. It does better in crappy conditions than its cousins, barley and wheat. And farmers use it as a natural weed control, since discourages weeds from getting a foothold. It’s also remarkably resistant to pests and diseases. No wonder grain grasses like wheat, barley and rye formed the backbone of human civilization. They’ll thrive just about anywhere. 

By Thanksgiving, it was lush and green, maybe six or eight inches tall. It stayed that way all winter. Frost and snow didn’t seem to bother it. Come spring, it was off to the races. The stuff grew like weeds – from inches to feet in just a few weeks. It really dressed up that formerly arid strip of yard, spawning a small meadow of green. (I challenge anybody to sit near it on a breezy day and not find meditative calm in the sight and sound of the gently swaying fronds.)

Then, it did what rye does: form heads. Holy cow! I might even get my harvest out of it. In hindsight, my reaction was kind of silly. What did I expect it to do? It’s rye, for Pete’s sake! 

I don’t know. I guess I had no expectations – so every little advance felt like a miracle. 

And it was.

Why didn't I think of this sooner?

Well, to be fair, I thought of it. Just never acted on it.

One reason I dreaded the annual compost top dress was how tedious just getting the compost is. (Not to mention days of manual labor moving it around.) I'd been driving to the county dump with my little Jeep-towed trailer, buying it a yard at a time. Getting just one load rarely takes less than 45 minutes. A half hour if all the stars align.

This yard is way too big. It needs around 15 yards of compost for the annual top dress. That probably cost me 10 hours or more, just driving back and forth to the dump and waiting my turn.

I'd always wondered about delivery but never inquired until this year. The price per yard is the same, with a 20-yard minimum and a $50 delivery charge. Sign me up!

It arrived. In a big way. Gotta go. I've got some compost spreading to do.

Spring Report (early)

Spring sprung rather early this year. Well, technically, it didn't really 'spring' at all, as we didn't have much of a winter.

And this year is do or die. Year three of Tukey's three-year plan. If the lawn turns to proverbial excrement this summer, it's going to be serious soul-searching time.

I am cautiously optimistic. First, the clover has never looked better. I am fairly confident this is related to the 2011-12 non-winter. Normally the snow and ice does a number on it. It rarely comes up this strong in spring (and I can't reseed this time of year since I'm also spreading pre-emergent to discourage the crabgrass seeds from germinating.) But this year it's thick and lush, at least in some spots.

Second, I bit the bullet and had the 'builder's grade' irrigation system repaired. No offense meant if you're a builder. But our builder's sprinkler contractor was a team of Keystone Kops Knuckleheads. They didn't bother to review the property plan – simply guessing where the borders were. They installed the wrong kind of head nozzles. And they did not optimize the well pump for irrigation. Nice work, guys.

The result - desert-dry swaths throughout the property. So, this year, I've finally corrected all those blunders. Even though an organic lawn requires way less water than a chemical one - it needs some. All those bone-dry, drought-prone swaths grew mainly crabgrass and black medick, no matter how often I watered. We'll see how they do this year.

Stay tuned.

Good news, bad news (but mostly good)

What the whole yard should look like.

Summer number two is behind us. I have to admit, by mid-August I was pretty ticked off about the whole thing and ready to throw in the towel. Now that cooler weather (and heads) have prevailed, I can give you a more accurate account of what's going on out there.

First the bad news. The crabgrass had its way with the lawn for most of the summer. (In spite of my corn meal gluten vigilance.) The black medick went a little nuts, too - most likely a product of my crappy builder's-grade sprinkler system. Black medick likes dry and we have plenty of that. The pinheads who installed the sprinkler system didn't give us enough heads so there are great swaths of lawn untouched by water, no matter how long I run the sprinklers. A fix for another day.

That's about it. Not too terrible.

The good news: the good grass made a strong comeback once the weather cooled and the crabgrass died off; the dandelions are much fewer in number than in previous years; and the clover patches are doing really well.

The magical fall comeback

I didn't post all summer for one reason. I was ticked off.

Spring wasn’t too bad. The dandelions were less numerous this year and the crabgrass seemed more manageable.

Then midsummer came along. Hot, dry, hotter and drier. Did I mention it was hot and dry?

Attempting to avoid a repeat of 2010, I had a mid-summer application of corn gluten meal ready to go. Before the crabgrass took over the neighbor’s lawns, I had it down. Thought I'd nipped it in the bud.

I was wrong. I might have well flushed $100 down the commode, or so I thought. The crabgrass spread like Britney Spears Twitter gossip, in spite of my corn gluten vigilance.

It was a dark moment in my organic lawn journey. After 24 months of toil, way too much money and countless weekends lost to lawn labor ... my lawn looked about the same as it did when the chemical squad was spraying and salting my yard with nasty herbicides, insecticides and other miscellaneous life-icides.

I'll be perfectly honest, I was ready to throw in the towel in this folly of an organic lawn experiment and buy some big-ass bags of cheap-ass chemical weed-&-feed for spring.

Just thinking about the lawn put me in a dark mood. I harbored fantasies of to sending Tukey email to give him a piece of my mind and calling Mike McGrath on his radio show to yell at him.

Of course, I wouldn’t do either of those things, no matter how angry I got. First, my mom didn’t raise any pinheads and second, it’s a lawn, for God’s sake. It’s not the kind of thing that warrants that kind of emotional expenditure.

So I stewed and plotted. I had a compromise planned. Come spring, I’ll go to the turf warehouse and by some straight pre-emergent, without herbicide. Maybe that way I could get a jump on the crabgrass without killing the clover I’d so carefully encouraged for the past two years. At least the crabgrass was green, albeit the wrong green.

Then something uncanny happened. By August, when the hottest part of summer was over, the lawn transformed itself. As the crabgrass died off, new growth of good grass and clover replaced it. Little by little, the days grew shorter, the nights grew cooler – and the lawn got greener.

This is what a healthy lawn is supposed to do. But here’s the news flash: it had never happened here before. Any other year, the crabgrass took over all summer. When it died, come fall, it left a brown desert in its place. When the chem-squad was showing up every other month to spread poison, they were killing the soil. Dead soil, dead lawn – every fall, like clockwork.

As I was plotting revenge fantasies against Tukey and McGrath for leading me astray, watching the crabgrass race across the lawn, the roots of the good grass were feeding and growing below. As soon as Mother Nature took the crabgrass out of the picture, the lawn bounced back – like a champ.

That’s big. And unprecedented.

Sorry, Paul. Sorry, Mike. Sorry for doubting you. Sorry for muttering unkind things about you, under my breath. You guys are OK in my book. I'm glad I hung in there.

Thank God I never sent that e-mail.

Again with the corn gluten meal

Last year we were caught with our pants down. By Independence Day the crabgrass was going completely nuts in the yard.

Mid-season around here, there's a big bloom of newly germinated crabgrass. It's obvious thanks to the bright, kelly-green color. I think it's this guy, but not entirely sure. And it's everywhere. Every lawn, empty lot and roadside. I even pulled some from a discarded flowerpot yesterday.

My lawn is pretty diverse right now - all kinds of wonderful turf crops and herbs sprawling out there. The perfect cover to hide the new blades of crabgrass. I never even saw them.

But up the street - a blue-green carpet of chemical-induced monoculture. Not so diverse. And smack in the middle, a patch of bright green crabgrass. That was my sentinel moment. It's a few weeks early - thanks to an uncharacteristic heat wave last week, I suspect.

Back to the seed store. Fortunately they still had a few bags of meal. And on to the lawn. The weather cooperated perfectly. It started drizzling as I was spreading and rained nice and steady for several hours thereafter. Mother nature watered it in for me. Today's going to be dry - the perfect cycle for corn gluten activation. It won't kill what's already sprouted but at least it will put the cabash on any new seedlings.

Keeping my fingers crossed.

Year Two: Diversity

I don't know if this is wrong, right or "other." But it looks beautiful to me.

At least four species in this one small patch of lawn: the fescue I planted and three soil-improving legumes. Midway through our year-two growing season, they are pumping nitrogen into the soil, so we don't have to.

• Rabbit's Foot Clover; Trifolium arvense
• White Clover; Trifolium repens
• Black Medick; Medicago lupulina

All "weeds" according to conventional market hype (and the neighbors). Fortunately, once you join the ranks of organic turf farmers, you no longer have to swallow market hype.

The neighbors? I placate them with free homemade beer. That salves their grumbling. :-)

Hops, the sequel

Here's the 2010 harvest. Yeah, that's the whole thing, About a quarter ounce. OK, not quite enough to compete with Anheuser-Busch. But for me, a huge victory.

After trying to grow hops without success for years - I've finally hit a formula that works. And now that I'm geared up for next year's Hop Merchant invasion* ... I have no doubt the 2011 harvest will be buckets more.

I picked them maybe a week late - they were starting to get a bit brown on the edges. But the fragrance was wonderful. They're cascades if memory serves. (Hard to remember what I planted and hard to tell what survived the winter.)

A week after harvest they went into the brew kettle - helping flavor a batch of English stout we whipped up. At this quantity their presence is largely ceremonial, but it felt good to throw home-grown organic hops into the mix.

*Assuming some other creepy crawly doesn't get in under the radar.

There be hops here

I guess three's the charm.

Planted hops at the old place. Not enough sun, no hops. Planted them here, last year. No hops - the first year is all root growth. This year: hops! Yay!

Growing them organically can be a challenge, though. We had an active Japanese beetle year. I kept them at bay with garlic juice and fels-naptha soap solution. But something kept eating the hops even after the beetles split (they only last a few weeks in mid summer).

Closer examination revealed a small, fuzzy caterpillar. The aptly named Hop Merchant, also known as the Eastern Comma. Nice butterflies, but not welcome on my hop vines. So I switched the protocol to BT, the biological caterpillar killer. That did the trick, though it was late in the season when I realized my problem was bigger than garlic and soap.

Next year I'll be ready. That's what I am figuring out with this whole organic experiment. You read, you do homework and then you put your knowledge into practice. As in the rest of life on Earth, experience is the best teacher.

Why grow hops you might ask. I like 'em. They are really beautiful although not the most colorful of flowers. I brew my own beer but I won't have enough this year to actually use them in a batch. Next year, maybe. I think these are Cascades - but that's a guess. They seem to be the hardiest of the bunch. Planted three or four varieties - these survived the blizzards.

Goodbye 2,4-D. Hello, diversity

Completely amazed at how different our lawn is after only a few months without broad-spectrum herbicides like 2,4-D – what Americans spread by the thousands of ton as "Weed & Feed."

The obvious is what I expected: the clover are recovering nicely. Not only the white that I sowed in fall, but some wild red, rabbit's foot and hop clover – legumes that perform many important tasks: they are greening up areas of the lawn where grass is less successful; they mow well; and they will be pumping nitrogen into the soil all season, extracting it right from the air.

A newcomer this year: Star of Bethlehem. A type of wild hyacinth, they're not native to these parts but have established themselves as an escaped ornamental. Poisonous to livestock and no favorite of farmers, we're happy to see them since we don't have any domestic animals grazing out there.

There's a fair amount of Wood Sorrel, which accents the lawn with pretty yellow flowers.

Speaking of which, of course there's a downside to giving up 2,4-D: dandelions. But we've had precious few compared to the neighbors' chemical lawns, which were completely overrun this year. The occasional bull thistle, chickweed, creeping charlie and fleabane have to be yanked by hand. But all in all I am very optimistic – I think the sudden surge in diversity is a good sign that the health of the lawn is improving and coming off the drugs won't be nearly as traumatic as what I envisioned last fall.

No free lunch

Roundup-resistant weeds are changing the game for agribusiness and its attempt to monopolize the world's food crops. Can't think of a better example of how technology will eventually fail – in a big way.

Not too bad

If it weren't me talking, I'd say that's a pretty nice looking lawn.

Let's hope it looks as good in the middle of August.

My worm tea is a chick magnet

You can't make this stuff up.

A bit of background. I am fortunate to live in a neighborhood of very attractive moms, The Mrs. included. In fact, I recently I suggested to her that we petition the town to change our street's name to "MILF Island."

And the other day I finally carved out some time to dig into the worm bin and see if I had enough compost to make a batch of tea. I did, as it turned out. The worms had completely vacated level one, as promised, and had moved on to new food supplies on the higher levels. They'd left me a good 10 lbs. or more of incredibly rich castings, seeded with a few uneaten eggshells. (They don't eat them, I learned, unless you grind them up first.)

So once I'd finished cleaning and rearranging the worm farm, I had my compost ready for a batch of tea. I was well prepared. I had a mesh bag from the homebrew supply store, an air pump and aerator from the aquarium supply store, a clean, new garbage can picked up with hardware store reward points and a nifty brass spray head that had recently arrived by mail. (Really well-made product and it shipped free.) Most folks mix up a few gallons of tea at a time but I knew I'd need more than that. Big lawn.

Although some recent research has debunked the conventional organic wisdom, most in the community agree that compost tea remains an important component of the organic lawn protocol. The whole lawn needs sprayed once a month during the growing season. It both fertilizes the grass the treats the soil, encouraging the growth of beneficial organisms that keep the soil healthy and boost natural disease resistance.

A few days later my big-pot-o-worm-tea was ready to spray. It was too windy but I learned too late that you have to plan your tea brewing carefully: the tea is good for only 24 hours or so, then the bacteria and other stuff growing in there starts to die off. So it was now or never, wind or no.

I assembled my tea bucket and sprayer and started on the first of my sixty gazillion square feet. That's when my next door neighbor's big Cadillac Escalade pulled up. She hopped out and made a bee line for me.

"Is that the worm tea?!"

"Yup."

"Omigod - that is so cool! I've been reading all about it! How does it work?!"

I could scarcely believe how excited she was. Way more than I. So I showed her the whole works, the spray head, the tea, the bucket - a salvaged kitty litter bin. She was beside herself.

"Hey," I said, brushing my hair off my forehead. Real cool and suave, like. "I'm gonna have extra worm tea. I made too much. You want what's left?"

She was like an eleven-year-old on Christmas morning. "But I don't have one of those spray thingies!"

I smiled and looked her right in the eye. "No prob, sweet pea. You can borrow mine."

Am I the King of the 'Burbs, or what?

A shout-out to Mike McGrath

Mike rocks. Period.

If you don't know him, you need to remedy that. Hear him weekends on your local NPR radio station. He's a complete goofball – a perennial pun purveyor and a real Philly guy. Mike doesn't tell you how to grow tomatoes. He tells you how to grow tah-may-tahs.

The best thing about Mike is that he's one smart cookie – and he's passionate about keeping chemicals out of America's yards and gardens.

If you can't get his radio show in your town, check out his amazing online archive. A veritable encyclopedia of gardening success.

Thanks, Mike!

Attack of the zombie dandelions

I like dandelions. I really do. They're miracles engines of life on earth. They're cute. They feed my neighbor's honeybees. They're nostalgic for me: I grew up picking and eating them with my Italian grandmother.

And they're tough little buggers that grow anywhere. They don't even need dirt. Take a dandelion seed, add rocks and a half a drop of water and in five minutes, you've got nifty yellow flowers.

I've dubbed 2010 the Year of the Dandelion. I guess all that snow and rain guaranteed every last seed would germinate this year. Never saw a year like it.

But I am a realist. I know I can't let them grow in my yard. Suburban etiquette and all. So I spend an hour a day (or more) yanking the buggers out by the roots. I fill a bucket with 10 or 20 pounds of them and dump them into the compost pile – the perfect blend of green and brown a compost pile loves.

One more reason I respect them – the photo at the top of this post. They knew they were in trouble, having been uprooted from their comfy lawn mooring. So they immediately went to seed in the compost bin. One last desperate act of procreation.

If a plant ever had indomitable spirit, it's the dandelion.

Well, I was wrong

Earlier I posted "Who needs a soil test when you have sheep sorrel?" I had just spread 16 million yards of leaf compost (at least that's how my arms felt) and the sheep sorrel was popping up everywhere.

Tukey's voice in my head: "read your weeds." Sheep sorrel is acid-loving, an indication your pH is low. It dovetailed with my preconceived notions about my soil, reinforcing the tale I'd heard from friend after friend after neighbor for years: in south Jersey, he soil's so acidic, you can't overlime.

We were all wrong. Tukey's voice again: "get the soil test."

Went down to my county Extension Service and picked up my $20 dirt bag. Seriously, it's a little canvas bag you stuff with soil and send off to Rutgers University for testing. And you don't even need a box - the Post Office sends it as is. Pretty cool.

About two weeks later, the test results arrived. And these words jumped out at me:

pH: 7.45 Very slightly alkaline, indicative of overliming.

Yikes! Here I was liming spring and fall – heeding the conventional wisdom – and I actually pushed the pH high.

The problem: high pH limits the availability of key minerals, including copper, manganese and boron. The good news – the report recommends "Amendment with organic matter is the best long-term solution ..." Bingo. That would be ... compost tea. The problem will take care of itself with time. And there's a bright side. I can skip the fall liming which will satisfy my lazy side.

Lesson: get the soil test. It might surprise you.