Category: Farming

This article has everything to do with raspberries and nothing to do with berets. You all know my propensity  towards songs and lyrics, this one is of course a nod to Prince. His music was highly influential on my life in the mid to late eighties. I was fortunate enough to see him live many years back with my best friend Maria. So, a tip of the hat and a heart felt R.I.P Prince.

On to the topic at hand. So this was either one of our best or one of our worst ideas ever. We were offered a bag of raspberry plant cuttings a couple months ago and of course we said yes without fully thinking it through. We have some planter boxes across the front of the house. One on each side of the porch that we have had a hard time finding and/or growing anything in them (other than invasive weeds). There is also a stretch of fence in the back yard where nothing really grows well either. So we decided to fill both areas with raspberry bushes.

These are in the front yard. See all the little sticks?

This is a section of the back yard area.

I think we ended up with about 25 plants. I was kind of joking about not thinking this project through. So like I said this is either going to be a great idea; providing us with enough raspberries in the future for pies, pastries and all sorts of goodies OR a horrible idea creating a wily, impenetrable fortress surrounding the house and yard. Probably more like ‘a little from column A and a little from column B’. Our plans are to keep them wrangled pruned so they don’t get too out of control. A few didn’t live through the transplant but around 20 or so did. In my head they are going to make a delicious moat around the house. At the very least it will prevent anyone from peeping in our windows……..or getting close to the house…..or delivering the mail. The ones that survived being transplanted started growing like crazy, giving pause to the sanity of this project. They were just little sticks in the beginning.

Some of them are already starting to bloom.

We really didn’t expect to get any berries this year but I have to wonder if those blooms will give us some if the birds don’t get them first. I bought some netting in preparation for what I imagine will be an avian free for all. I already had to put netting on the blueberry bush. It’s a different kind of netting though. I always say, “My blueberry is getting married!”. It’s netting left over from my sister Holly’s wedding.

Speaking of sister’s wedding, they gave out little pine trees as favors. I have two left. I had four but gave a couple away. I just recently re-potted this one. The neighbors fig tree dropped seeds into the pot with the pine and now we also have a fig tree! My plan was to separate them into two different pots. Alas, they are entwined lovers never to be separated, so I just gave them a bigger home.

I will definitely keep you posted on our raspberry decision. If we become entombed by brambles, we at lease have the means to call for rescue 😉

Take it simple    -Sam and Stacey-

Here I go, here I go, here I go again. Hoop houses baby! These were a long time coming. We both felt a little silly once they were done because it only took about $20 and 2 hrs to complete all six beds. The last several years we have been making late night and early morning runs outside to cover and then uncover each garden bed. We were using and recycling dollar store plastic drop clothes and any heavy plastic we could find/reuse. It was a shoddy operation at best. Usually any temps that were under 40 degrees called for some form of frost protection. Granted, we are planting cold hearty veggies for fall like arugula, kale, collards, beets and carrots but it would suck to lose even a small amount because we didn’t cover them for even one night. So now we are on autopilot! We still have to uncover them to water every few days, but even that is quick and easy. It is supposed to rain in the next couple days and the night time lows will be in the 40s. My plan is to uncover those days and nights and let mother nature handle my water duties. I bought a couple outdoor thermometers at the dollar store. The inside temps of the hoop houses is about 20 degrees warmer than outside. I took some photos of the temp readings but the pics were just blah unimpressive so you’ll have to take my word for it. It was 52 (and sunny) outside and the hoop houses were about 75 degrees. Considerably warmer than the inside of my own home right now. Lucky little seedlings.

“Repurpose, reuse, figure it out. Make it work or do without.”    –Me-

This is our motto. Living a simple life is important to us. We try really hard not to be consumers who just consume things out of convenience. People who just throw the old stuff into the landfills because something ‘newer’ comes along. We always ask ourselves before we buy something if it’s something that will serve us and enrich our lives in some way. So yes, every once in a great while I might need a new pair of boots to ‘enrich’ my life but hey, nobody’s perfect. But for the most part we just aren’t ‘that’ demographic. Seriously, other than food, we pretty much either acquire our possessions from garage sales, thrift stores or hand-me-downs. Just about any other purchase we make is a raw material or tools to make the things we ‘need’. All of which is fine by me. It makes me proud to live the simplest life I can. So, I basically went on this rant because of the materials we used to make some of the hoop houses and why it only cost about $20. We sprang for two new rolls of heavy plastic (hallelujah!) and a few pieces of 10′ electrical conduit. Sam the man reused an old pop up awning to make the A-frames.

Here is a photo of the manky, shabby frost protection of yesteryear. Those are tomato cages holding the plastic up. It works but a little rain and it all comes smashing down on our babies. The plastic is ‘Seran wrap thin’ and difficult to work with. It did the job but just wasn’t the Cadillac we deserved.

This isn’t a very good photo but the pop up canopy used to cover the tear drop trailer. Sam did his best to reinforce the metal frame but over the years both frame and fabric just disintegrated.

Never to let anything go to waste, Sam repurposed the metal frame into A-frame forms for two of the garden beds.

It worked great for the smaller beds but not so well for the larger permiculture bed. It was too shallow and greatly diminished to usable growing area of that bed. The plants in this bed would have quickly grown up onto the plastic. So we used the electric conduit here.

This bed is around 7 1/2 feet wide. The conduit is 10′ long. We used conduit for two reasons. First it was a little cheaper than schedule 40 PVC, and secondly it is for above and underground making it much more resilient to the weather. The next picture is a great example of repurposing. To anchor the conduit we drove stakes into the ground and then slipped the pipe over. What did we use for stakes you ask? Believe it or not these are pieces of the metal frame from one of those fold up camp chairs. Go ahead and laugh because these same pieces have also been plant stakes, ladybug houses and about 5 other things. Notice black milk jugs!

You can see a couple of the chairs in the background of this picture. They are still serving their original purpose hehehe. Also, here is what the A-frames look like.

Also take note of the black containers in these pics. I will explain those in a minute. These pics were taken a few days before Thanksgiving! Thanksgiving folks! Notice the tee shirt and shorty shorts? It was about 75 degrees that day but I’m not kidding it was 48 degrees less than three days later. You have to make hoop houses hay while the sun shines.

Once the conduit was in place we used (reused) pieces of bamboo stakes across them to hold up the plastic and stabilize the conduit. This gave it a better dome shape that wouldn’t collect water when it rains. We just used electrical tape to secure them in place. FYI the bamboo stakes were the arms for the Halloween witch circle, among many other things. I got a bundle of six of them at the dollar store a couple years ago.

Next we needed a way to secure the edges so they wouldn’t sag down or blow onto plant babies and at the same time would be easy for a one man cover/uncover operation. So we taped various poles to the plastic on two sides of the beds.

This photo just happens to be another section of the canopy but we used a metal pipe, a wooden dowel and a couple other resourceful finds from the garden. We still have a few more tweeks we want to make so it’s even more user friendly and beautimous. For now though, we are super stoked on the way it came out. We will get the $20 back our first harvest of these fine organic veggies!

One last thing, the black containers all over the garden! Even these poor guys are being used year after year. So here is the deal, take an old beverage container and paint it black. Fill it with water and put it in the garden. During the day the sun heats up the water inside and during the night releases that heat to help keep your garden warm.

Hope you enjoyed, leave a comment, take it simple

Sam and Stacey