The Kitchen Garden Company is proud to support the launch of The Gastrocast Podcast Forum.

While this forum is mainly a place for the listeners of The Gastrocast Podcast to share information, views and experiences, it is not limited to just listeners of the show. Anyone with something to add about food, cooking, gardening, farming, bokashi, and their intersection with the politics of what we eat may find it worthwhile joining.

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A Short Video to explain how simple it is to make some bokashi:

To learn more about this product and the process, you may want to read this and this.

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This week’s Gastrocast is out–the cooking show about “food, cooking and the politics of what we eat”. Apart from talking about things going on with the company, the island, and the garden we cook two Rhubarb dishes–A Rhubarb & Sweet Cicely Fool, and Grilled Pork Chops with Rhubarb Cumberland Sauce. It’s spring turning into summer, it’s food out of the garden and it’s all good.

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Okay gardeners. Now is the time to deal the deals and talk the talk. Haying season is almost here and the best source of free garden soil improvement is up for grabs. Yes, I am talking about last years hay. As farmers clear out their barns of old or broken bales to make room for fresh fodder you have a chance to strike a deal with them to your gardens benefit. Most of the times the farmers will give the stuff away if you haul it.
Why? Because often farmers don’t care enough about utilizing what they have–there’s just so much of it and only so much time. . . . So, get on the list now before things really heat up in a month or so and the haying begins. I’m sure I don’t have to tell you all what use are old bales. Do I?

Old bales are great for making impromptu sheds–just stack um high and find a roof. We used an arrangement like this years ago to house two calves for several months. Likewise, old bales make great mulch–under strawberries, on garden paths, over newly planted seeds, in the compost pile. If you have chickens, and I hope you do, old hay is great in the chicken yard–make sure it hasn’t been damp or moldy. Just lay it in thick and the chickens eat it, forage for bugs in it, and it covers their waste while helping improve the soil. And for dormant garden beds, where the soil needs ammendment, you can’t go wrong in covering with a thick layer of old hay. Don’t worry about your cover crops coming up through it either. It may delay things for up to a week, but once through the hay, any crop will grow like normal.

So get out into the countryside, visit your local farms, get on the old hay list and start building community relationships and quality, organic soil.

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Spring appears to have given away to summer and we are left scrambling to plant everything to take advantage of the hot weather. All the tomatoes, eggplants, chillies and basil have been planted in the polytunnel and the average temperature in there is 85 degrees F.

Outside it has hit 70 degrees F. here today and I have been getting a nice sunburn tilling the final bed of the garden. It’s so hot, I’m afraid it may have done something to the little Mantis Tiller we use to keep the beds nice and fluffy. Too bad because I was almost done with the last bed when it quit.

The lettuce in the polytunnel has held up well and is getting giant. We have hardly had a chance to use a fraction of it, which is okay because if it lasts it will tie in nicely with the greens coming up outside which are sorely behind. A good dose of this hot sun should boost growth everywhere.

The rhubarb is ready for harvest–at least some of it. I am hoping the rest will hang on till the strawberries are ripe, as the bushes are overloaded with blossoms. All of this is reminding me I should head out and pick some radishes. . . .

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In order to help clean up the garden, I built this chicken tractor to move about the place. It’s a little heavy, but slides over the grass smoothly. I may fit some wheels on at some point.

So far, the 10 lucky chicks have been moved 4 times in 8 days and don’t seem to mind. I always move them in the morning while they’re still locked in their little house. At some point, when they are larger, I will have to reduce the number of birds in the tractor, but for now they seem content enough.

By leaving the tractor in each spot for two days the chicks seem to get plenty of grass/weeds and stir up the ground a bit. Outside the garden I let them crop down the grass and dig a bit. In the garden beds I’ve let them really dig up the beds and root out the weeds as much as possible in two days. I’ve been supplimenting their diet with the usual mix of grains thrown on the ground.

It takes a bit to move the tractor each time, but not having to pull the weeds or till them in should be great. Plus each bed should be well fertilized for planting later in the month.  Once the garden is cleaned up and the cover crops are consumed and soil amended, I’ll have to work out a program of moving the chicks around the place. I may have to rotate out a few and transfer in some others from the main chicken run. As a small scale experiment I think this works great and I would easily add another tractor or a larger one to our setup. This current one may soon be a part of our specialty breeding program. . . .an attempt to get a decent “old time” meat bird without relying on the cornish cross breed.

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We have been having some severe gales here this past week with winds gusting to 60 miles per hour. A few days ago I awoke expecting to find the polytunnel gone. Fortunately there was only some minor damage. Last night there was another horrific wind storm with gusts shaking the house and all kinds of teeth gritting, jarring sounds coming from outside. I was afraid to look this morning lest I the tunnel be gone.

Wow! It was still there! Nevertheless, there was quite a bit of damage–4 more broken rib joints. I was able to patch them with some materials here on the farm, but I think I will have to leave the island soon to pick up more supplies as I don’t think these winds are done for the season. I will probably end up making this repair a standard for all the ribs.

Fortunately the tunnel is flexible enough to take quite a bit of movement from the wind, but I hope we don’t have much more gale force wind this Spring. We’ve already had more than I can remember there ever being.

Nevertheless, the tunnel seems to be doing its job and while I was in working I noticed several sprouts coming up in the portion I have already planted.

You can find more pictures here, and a short film here.

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Outside, the weather has been alternately, bitterly cold and rainy. The other night we had a violent gale which left us without much sleep. Between worrying about the power going out and having to find somewhere to move the baby chickens in to where it was warmer (it was about 36 outside) and whether the polytunnel would survive the night I don’t think I slept a wink. Fortunately the storm swung away from us and we we didn’t get the full brunt, but gusts were still up to 65mph. The power never went out, or I think we might have lost chickens. However, the polytunnel did sustain some damage. I spent an hour the yesterday moring repairing two broken ribs so they wouldn’t fly apart and tear the covering. I managed a sucessful repair, even in my sleep deprived state. As the weather warmed into the upper 40′s I was feeling much better about our two pet projects–veggie starts and chicks.

With all the wind and cold there hasn’t been as much activity in the polytunnel as I’d hoped. The tunnel usually manages to keep a 10 degree average temperature difference from outside temperatures, and the soil is much warmer than elsewhere in the gardens, but without much sun it hasn’t gotten above 50 for a week or so. The wind also sucks the temperature right out.

Meanwhile, in where it is warmer we have sprouts in all the trays we started. It’s looking like we’ll have to re-start some of the plants because they got leggy as if it were too warm on the heat mat. The cucumbers rotted at the base after they grew to a few inches tall. Our mistake for leaving them too damp I think.

If the weather continues being unseasonably cold, for out here, we might have additional trouble. We always plant peas around St. Patrick’s Day. The weather has been so foul I haven’t been able to get in to work the soil. This weekend is predicted to be sunny however, and perhaps we can get out and prep a bed or two.

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It has been hovering around freezing here for over a week, and there has been a mixture of gale force winds, rain and crystal blue skies. But none of that has stopped progress with the Polytunnel. This past week found me braving frostbite to haul in several wheelburrow loads into the tunnel to improve the quality of the soil.

The ground where I built the tunnel has been field for a while. In the past we had blueberries planted there and some strawberries for a while. It has also been used as a chicken run and used to be the path to a compost heap. However the soil wasn’t that great.

After stripping the grass off the surface I was faced with a mix of okay loam and heavy clay. Since the tunnel has kept the ground nice and warm even though the earth is frozen outside, I made my move. Several weeks ago, before the tunnel was covered, I turned in as much chicken manure and compost as I could at the time. This week, to help break up the heavy clay I hauled in 6 wheelburrow loads of sand. For the rest of the tunnel I wheeled in 4 loads–all I had left–of my homemade compost and then 1 large load of all the rabbit manure I could scrape from under their cages. I tilled all this in and raked it over until the soil looked very lush. It is still heavy in places and I have a lot of rocks and sticks to remove, but I am more confident about planting in it.

It is a quicker turn-around than I like. I would rather have prepared the soil last fall and given it time to mature over winter. However, the chicken and rabbit manure should both break down quickly and all the compost, filled with worms, should rapidly improve the soil. The sand has lightened the clay up considerably.

The final thing I did before planting was sprinkle some Bokashi over the surface to help energize the bioactive levels of the soil.

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