Miles's Thoughs

I can’t say I’m the most masterful of gardeners, but I do have some specific thoughts on the matter that have made life easier for me. The other day, my friend Jacob asked why I use raised beds, so I figure I can answer his question and more.Here’s our garden as it is today Why raised beds?

1. they warm up quicker in the spring. That are somewhat separated from the large heatsink that is the earth.
2. they discourage you stepping in them. If you have garden rows, it’s easy step where you’re not supposed to
3. guaranteed drainage.
4. easier to work. I sit on the edges.
5. easier to maintain a border between paths and growing area.
6. you have something to attach PVC pipe to for cold-frame plastic, bird netting, or shade cloth

Other thoughts

1. wood chips are your friend. (you can see a pile of them in front of my pickup.)
2. 1. a thick layer around your garden beds are great for preventing weeds. I have a 3 or 4 inche thick layer.
   2. get them for free from local tree trimming companies. They can pay the dump or a composting place to get rid of their chips, or they can dump them in your driveway. They don’t have to pay for disposal and you get free chips. We’re on our third load this year, each is about 5 yards.
3. Lime is your friend. I don’t know if this is specific to the northwest, but my friend Markus once suggested spreading lime on my lawn to green it up. He studied botany and gave me an explanation, most of which I don’t remember. What I do remember is that the rain that we get here leeches away much of the mineral content of the soil. Anyway, I dumped a bunch of the stuff on my lawn and I definitely see a difference. much greener.
4. recommended reading:
5. 1. Four-Season Harvest: Organic Vegetables from Your Home Garden All Year Long This book is about how to extend your growing season throug the use of cold frames and heartier plants. There are lots of bienniels that want to grow to the second year to go to seed. carrots, beets. Many greens do just fine in the cold. Lettuce won’t wilt if it’s still in the ground.
   2. This article If you have a piece of grass that you want to convert to flowers or garden, do you really need to dig up the grass? Just put down newspaper and dump compost on top of that. By the time the newspaper dissintegrates, the grass will be dead. Less work and better for the soil. digging damages a lot of the stupp that lives beneath the surface of the soil.
   3. I enjoyed Gaia’s Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture Permaculture should be renamed: Gardening for Lazy People. Don’t fight weeds, bugs and such. They will win. Setup the proper conditions for the plants you want and nature will maintain it for you.
   4. Not directly gardening, but food related is the book The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals I recommend this book to anyone above all other books. Most books that talk about where food comes from here in America are depressing to read. This covers the same topics and gives the same information but then goes on to offer practical alternatives and things to be aware of. If you take one recommendation from me, this is it. We all eat. We should all know more about where it comes from than we do.
   5. As a corralary to the Omnivore book, there’s the book Everything I Want To Do Is Illegal: War Stories From the Local Food Front This one is a bit more depressing, but I enjoyed reading it.

That’s all I have to say about that.

I recently came across two interesting articles in The Atlantic magazine on gender role type stuff.I chose my choice! and Are we not men? Both are actually book reviews in an editorial like format. I chose my choice talks about the ways women have and have not benefitted by moving from the home to the workplace. Is sitting in a cubicle really more rewarding than staying at home with the kids and is mixing a martini for the husband and preparing a roast for dinner really that bad compared to sitting in traffic? Of course, it’s all more complicated than that, but Sandra Tsing Loh has some interesting thoughts on it all. The other article is a review of a couple Playboy anthology type releases but the author spends most of the article talking comparing the things he learned by reading Playboy as a kid, reading the advice column. Contrary to what you’d expect, he learned some of the things that are are part of being a “Man” not in the macho sense, but in the strong, enlightened way that real men fit into society. Maxim, on the other hand just encourages boys to oogle and buy more stuff. I recommend both as good reads.

Awhile back, my friend Grady did a logo for my website. You can see it as the title of my blog (either you see it now, or if you’re using RSS agregation, you’ll need to go to the actual site) or at my homepage.Getting the logo onto my blog was actually a bit of a pain. Before, I was using an install of wordpress maintained by 1and1, my service provider. The problem was that they don’t let me edit the themes. Anyway, after a drawn out process of backing up the blog and some other stuff, I now have the flexibility of ading wordpress plugins and such. Anyway, thank you to Grady for the logo.

Recently, I’ve been thinking about how wood burns. It started when I read a post on the blog The Oil Drum when someone posted an opinion that instead of turning celulose into alchohol, we should just burn it by gasifying. As I understand it, when you heat wood, it gives off gases that will burn. It you make it hot enough, the carbon chains in the gases will reduce to simpler modecules that burn well and this is the key to a clean burn.This prompted me to do a bit of googling and that brought me to the WoodGas website which goes into more detail about how it works as well as information on how to make simple cookstoves, particularly for use in less developed countries. More googling and I arrived at a description of the MIDGE stove. Since I’ve been on sabatical, the last couple weeks, I’ve had some free time and I decided to build a stove out of ducting. I also have a big pile of woodchips that I got for free from a friend whose an arborist. The stove is composed of three lengths of ducting 6″, 8″ and 10″ in diameter, two reducer flanges and mesh. The 6″ duct holds the woodchips. The screen is to allow plenty of air to come through. Note the 4″x4″. This is not a part of the stove, it’s only to hold the duct, so I can drill holes. When the stoves is running, the chips burn from the top down giving off fumes. The ring of holes at the top of the duct injects more air into the stream of gases for combustion. One of the keys is to have it all happen in a hot, contained space. This is one of the main differences between a woodstove or fireplace insert and a basic fireplace. In a fireplace, it’s difficult to maintain a sufficient heat density. Once I had the center duct with plenty of holes (I actually want to add more, but that’ll require me to take the whole thing apart), I put it inside the next larger duct (8″) using a reducer flange and some sheet metal screws. Hopefully, the pictures illustrate it better than I can in words. The purpose of this is to guide heated air up and out of the holes using the chimney effect. Warm air rises. Now I have a duct that holds the chips and serves as a firebox. I have a mechanism for heating air and injecting it into the volotile gases. On it’s own, this works ok. Knowing that maintaining a hot space is key, I added a third duct (10″) to shroud the rest of this stove. The space between the 8″ and the 10″ is filled with sand. From reading around a bit, wood ashes serve as a good insulator, so maybe I’ll try that, but right now, I don’t have enough ashes. I did have sand though. I fired the stove up a couple times and it’s pretty cool to watch. I’m using green woodchips, but it only takes about 5 min for it to get going and stop smoking. Through experimenation, I’ve found that if the flame goes out, you get a LOT of smoke. The neighbors were probably wondering if I’d planning on burning down the house. This means you can’t realy add fuel to the fire once it’s going. Maybe using dry wood would change this dynamic, but for now, I’ll have to do it in batches. Here are some pics of the flame. Notice how it jets out from the air holes.

I got back from my trip to Maine/Boston where I took a Timberframing class. Here are some stitched photos as well as some normal ones. Excellent class. There were 38 students with a very broad demographic. Two father/son pairs. Three couples. A guy who’d just finished high school wanting to do architecture. 8 construction people. A bunch of retired people wanting to build their own homes. 5 engineers. A paramedic. I learned a lot; the teacher is an excellent teacher with lots of cool stories to keep you paying attention. I did more chisel work over a couple days than all my previous experiences combined. Here’s what we built:

Day before yesterday, I started driving to LA with my sister, Jovan. We’re in SF now. Since gas is over $4, I decided to take it slow, keeping the cruise control at 60. Most, but not all of the others on the road were faster, but not flying by.I filled the tank whenever we stopped somewhere, first after about 250 miles, and then again after about 200. In both cases, I calculated about 31.5 mpg! The EPA mileage for my car is 20/25 here’s the gov site for that I was pretty stoked. Last time I drove down, I think I got about 27 and I think I was going 65. Let’s say we go 1000 miles. That would mean 37 vs 31.7 gallon. At $.25/gallon, or $157.4 vs $134.9. 16.7 hours vs 15.4

Robie’s not the only one who can mess with the bees.

We’ve been expanding the garden each year, adding a couple beds at a time. Here’s what it looks like now. The large beds at 10’x3.5′

We’ve been expanding the garden each year, adding a couple beds at a time. Here’s what it looks like now. The large beds at 10’x3.5′   

Since I have as much space as I do (for a city boy), I generate a lot of compost. One ofthe problems I face is that there a many larger chunks in there that should be separated out.So I built a compost sifter. It needs some refinements, but it works ok.