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Here’s an interesting video from YouTube about back yard sustainability. Janaia Donaldson is interviewing Scott McGuire from Oregon about the project he’s running in the backyard of his rented property. The picture is lagging but that’s worst in the first 10 minutes when they talk face to face. After that they take a tour in Scott’s garden and the lagging becomes tolerable.

In the video you’ll find:

• Experimenting with growing wheat and amaranth
• Growing a medicine border
• Growing sun flower seeds
• Greenhouse for starting plants from seeds
• Drying herbs in greenhouse
• Dog kennel as chicken house
• Growing food for your animals
• Crimson clover as nitrogen fixer

and some other small but interesting things:

Photo by Squeezyboy.

Birds normally take cover during rain but not the blackbird. It’s running around out there in the garden getting wet, but it pays. A lot of earthworms are crawling to the surface as fast as they can, just to get eaten. Sad story. For the earthworm at least. But why on earth would they do that? It seems stupid.

Well is an earthworm stupid? At least it’s trying to survive. Earthworms have a problem with hard rain, which translates to water soaked soil. They have a soft moist skin through which they breathe oxygen from small air pockets in the surrounding soil. During rain these air pockets are filled with water and it gets hard for the worms to breathe. Therefore they are forced to take their chances and crawl to the surface in order to breathe.

Good news for the birds anyway.

Planting three tomato plants in one grow bag creates a mess, although the self-watering boxes are prepared for three plants having three internal tubes reaching down into the water.

When you’re dealing with cucumber plants it’s even too much with two plants in each grow bag:

One cucumber plant in each grow bag is a better solution.

Last year I did in fact only plant two tomato plants in each grow bag, with a good result. Here’s a picture from last year:

I’m building up my courage to try and grow tomatoes without the self-watering boxes and just grow them directly in the ground. I guess the boxes are not old school enough for me after all

The new potatoes are just about gone for the year and that leaves the soil bare. This is bad because rain will wash nutrients down into the ground, therefore it’s good to have something growing all the time. In the picture you’ll find six new rows of spinach ready to take over from the potatoes. This is known as successive planting, and spinach was something that would still grow according to my sowing calender. It doesn’t have to be edible plants, you can also plant something to be used as green manure. When your green manure dies later on you’ll have to compost it to enrich your soil making it possible to grower better vegetables later. By the way, raw spinach is very good with banana and water blended into a smoothie – yum!

I have this big 1000 litres tank that I collect rain water in, but I’m too lazy to actually carry the water in a 10 litres watering can out in the garden. That’s why I have installed a water pump in the tank to do the job.

I’ve spent a long time looking for a pump that was small enough to pass through the hole in the top of the tank since it had a nice screw-cap:

Unfortunately I didn’t find a pump that would fit so off with the cap. My friend Mr. Dremel helped me out:

Notice the colour of the rain water; this tank needs to be emptied soon I even noticed a couple of insects swimming around down there. Gross.

With the plastic perforated the remaining screw thread was cut away with a stanley knife:

This brand new Alko Rain 2500 rain water pump fits in the new hole in the water tank. I paid about 500 dkr. ($100) for this one.(230 V~, 350 W, H max 11 m, Q max 2.5 m3 / h, D 3 m.) The valve is just left fully open:

Yep, it fits and stands on the bottom. I’ve attached an extra string just in case:

I’ve put a wooden lid on top of the tank to keep small animals away so they won’t fall into the tank and drown:

Yes! It works. But I would estimate that it only delivers about 80-90 % of the pressure compared to tap water:

The rain water pump is connected to 42 metres (138 feet) of 0.5 inch hose so maybe that’s a bit too much for the pump. I’ll try to shorten the hose and see what happens.

When I turned off the pump I was surprised to see that the water kept coming out of the sprinkler:

This is due to the natural flow since the tank is placed a couple of meters higher that the sprinkler. It’s solved by disconnecting the sprinkler and using a connector with built-in stop valve.

The rain water pump system is working fairly well so the next step is connecting it to the soil moisture sensor system and build the automatic watering system I keep blabbering about

Last time I wrote about building a good bean trellis I only posted a drawing. Now I took the time to actually build it as you can see in these pictures.

Each bean plant has its own bamboo stick to climb. Hopefully the beans will hang down on the outside of the construction because the sticks are mounted in an angle.

It’s now possible to stand beside the bed and pick the beans without reaching into the middle of the bean wilderness.

It pays to watch the soil moisture closely if you want large vegetables. I’ve had good results this year using my garden logging system. Actually my vegetables have gotten a little out of hand. I think the cat is a bit scared too :

I’ve been kind of obsessed with soil moisture now that my logging system is up and running. I’ve checked the log a couple of times a day, and when the moisture level was low I ran out and turned on the sprinkler. I hope the large size doesn’t affect the taste too much.

What I did was that I checked the soil moisture graph and when the level was below 30 % I would water the vegetables. Looking at the graph below it shows that I’ve turned on the sprinkler three times during a week (week 27), Tuesday at 09:00, Wednesday at 23:00 and Friday at 21:00:

This process screams for a computer controlled solution and I’m working on connecting a water pump to the logging system to make it a soil moisture control system instead. It would need a hysteresis, like for instance turning the water ON below 30 % and turning it OFF above 80 %.

Another thing I’m working on is replacing my 1-wire Ethernet cable with proper outdoor Ethernet cable. The existing system has worked without any problems for half a year, but I just want to make the whole system even more durable, since the whole point of building this is to free time and energy and instability problems and break-downs take up just that, time and energy.

Is it true that if you remove all except one of the shoots on chitted potatoes you’ll get fewer but bigger potatoes? In the above picture the potatoes with many shoots are in the front and the ones with only shoot are in the back. The plants in the back are smaller with less foliage.

Well, in my case the yield from chitted mother potatoes with only one shoot was only 25 % compared to mother potatoes with many shoots:

And oh, the one shoots are smaller too. Bummer.

I have five old apple trees in my backyard which are quite old. I would estimate the oldest to be about 25 years old, and it has a trunk diameter of 30 cm (12 inch):

The problem I have with these old trees is that they grow like crazy. They have really dug in through the years. I was told that the former owners of the property would cut away any shoots each year, but I had hoped that I could avoid this work, since I don’t like cutting trees.

Last year they just got too big for my backyard garden, so I cut the trees back to where they were used to be before I moved in. That left me with a lot of twigs but the garden looked nice again.

Then the trees start growing like crazy this spring, putting up 50 cm (20 inch) shoots (see the first picture) and worst of all – not a single flower or apple So no apples on this years shoots.

They have used all their energy for growth and nothing for reproduction (apples). So I guess I’ll select about 10 shoots on each tree and cut away the rest to see if they’ll produce apples next year. Last year I picked 19 kg (42 pounds) for eating, and the birds got much more out of it.

Birds like strawberries just as much as we do so some kind of protection is necessary for the fruits to survive. I made a wire mesh cage out of chicken wire with small hatches in the sides and on top. Then it’s possible to stick your hand in and grab some of the strawberries as they mature. I used a bunch of plastic ties to keep it all together and 6 sticks hammered into the ground. I’ve put some long grass cuttings between the soil and the fruits to keep the fruit clean and healthy.

It must be a depressing view for a bird :

It takes a while to build the cage but it’s definitely worth it:

Yum!